Campaigns to get us to conserve water have seemed to defy the evidence of our senses this summer, writes Angela Long
THE REPORTS that Dublin faces water shortages because Irish water is "not in the right place" brings to mind the old British Rail explanation of why services ground to a halt when snow fell in winter: it was "the wrong kind of snow". Had it been the right kind, standard regulation snow that conformed to all the rules, there would have been no problem.
Cheeky, nonconformist snow.
And in Ireland, with our joke summer and 40 shades of rain-washed green, the water is in the wrong place, the experts tell us.
Or else we are. While we, the people, tend to have congregated in a foolish pack half way down the east coast, the water has smirkily lavished its attentions on the north and the west. This turns on its head the traditional message from the history books, that people settled where there was a good supply of water and perhaps a port, to convey goods for buying and selling. So the Baile Átha Cliath grew up around the dark pool, the Liffey, which is tragically inadequate for the needs of a 21st century thirsty people.
Competition for resources tends to highlight the less attractive aspects of human nature. After a few tentative suggestions that water might be piped from the Shannon area to ease the possible future waterlessness of Dublin, the Shannon People's Alliance stepped up to the plate with alacrity to say "feck off", couched in rather more elegant terms, but with the basic message. This dispute looks promising for filling newspaper columns and airwaves with bitter rows long after the Lisbon Treaty and the siting of waste incinerators are just fond memories.
Water, water, everywhere and not a drop to drink? It has been a noticeably wet August, which was unfortunate for those behind Dublin local authorities' campaign to become water conscious. No need to tell people not to use the hose on their gardens when the rain is so heavy they can't get out the door.
But the now familiar statistic, that 30 per cent or so of water lost in the capital is due to leaking pipes, is another factor to reduce the campaign's impact; people can say, "Sure, it doesn't matter if I have a half-hour shower every day because it's the council's fault, they don't repair the leaks in the pipes."
We won't really believe there is a problem with the water supply until the grass in the garden turns yellow and stubbly, and the sky glows blue and hot for days on end. Wake up, you've nodded off in the middle of this fine commentary. Dreams of Costa Irlanda do not address the issue.
But that is the harsh reality. When the place is awash and the summer's most common image is mudlarking teenagers at country festivals - or more poignantly, heartsick organisers of agricultural shows cancelling for the second year running - who is going to think clean water is not plentiful?
And clean is the key word, as Prof John Sweeney of NUI Maynooth said in his warning this week. Clean water is a treasured resource in many parts of the world, and we have taken it for granted in Ireland for generations.
But ask the people of Galway who suffered months of boil-water restrictions last year, due to problems with the cryptosporidium bacterium at local treatment plants.
It is always instructive to look at what happens elsewhere, in the famed journalistic tradition of could-it-happen-here, twinned with how-do-they-do-it-better-elsewhere. So at the moment, just on a rough reckoning, the United Arab Emirates, the south-western United States and Australia are also busy exhorting people to be thrifty with water use.
Vistas of golden sands, dry creek beds, clear blue skies, tumblin' tumbleweed, all come to mind easily from those locations. But Naul? Mullingar? Dungloe? In Melbourne, where I grew up, a regular television ad in 1960s' summers was a shocking series of pictures of people finding there was no water coming out of kitchen taps, school-drinking fountains, farm pipes. An alarm sounded in the background as the voice-over intoned solemnly, "Water is life." Drought was a regular visitor - every few years to give us a scare and limit watering of our lawns.
But that was the ha'penny place. Melbourne, indeed the whole continent, has been in the grip of a drought for at least the past six years. There is no longer a discussion of drought, but an acknowledgement that the climate has changed, and for good. The lush green expanse of Albert Park, where the Melbourne Grand Prix is held, has been a dustbowl since the early years of this century. And the citizens are banned from watering their gardens, or having a shower that is longer than two minutes. Yes, it does give rise to amusing speculation about "shower inspectors", but the reality is pretty grim.
And here we are, on the other side of the climate change coin, and it's raining cats and dogs, even on the posters the conservation campaign has erected around town. At our local Dart station pet-owners have decorated the poster with the names of their own animals, presumably. (One, alas, is Pubes.)
But how do you convince people of the scarcity of a resource which is cascading all around them? There's a public education challenge. Try telling Inuit folk they can't build their homes out of ice any more.
Musician Tom Waits, in his damp squib concert in the Phoenix Park last month, might have cursed us. But greater forces are in play and Waits's Make It Rain song was surplus to requirements, as the thudding sound on the canvas of the venue tent made clear before the song was over.
But nobody should be fooled: water is the big story of the coming decades. You can't live without it, and people will fight to the death for it. Oil is important, but in the Middle East, in sub-Saharan Africa, and even here in Dublin, that tagline from the Australian ads bears the truth: water is life.
Angela Long is a freelance journalist. Vincent Browne is on leave