When did you last drink from an Irish river? Not think about it, or wish you could do it \u2013 actually scoop a cupful of cold water out of a stream, and swallow it without thinking twice?<\/p>\n
For most of us, it\u2019s an absurd question. You\u2019d no more drink a sup of the Liffey, the Shannon or the Barrow than you\u2019d get down on your knees and slowly lick a busy footpath. Even if you were dying of thirst at the edge of one of our few remaining gin-clear pristine rivers, every instinct would say no. Clear is not the same as clean, and well we know it; what we can\u2019t see is what stops us.<\/p>\n
And yet, within living memory, you could. I\u2019ve written before about Paddy Mackey, a Nenagh man who, as a child, drank straight from Lough Derg \u2013 the water was that pure. We have \u2013 or more precisely, the policies of successive governments have \u2013 in just decades, normalised something that would have struck our grandparents as shocking and utterly broken.<\/p>\n
The facts tell the story. In the 1980s about 500 Irish rivers were classed as the very best of the best. Today, there are about 20 \u2013 that\u2019s a 96 per cent collapse in a single working life. The Environmental Protection Agency\u2019s Water Quality in Ireland 2019\u20132024, found that just 52 per cent of our surface waters meet minimum legal standards, meaning that 48 per cent are failing, as are 70 per cent of our estuaries. <\/p>\n
It is a shameful failure of governance and policy, and a collective acceptance of shockingly low standards. On the current trajectory, we haven\u2019t a hope in hell of meeting the 2027 deadline, which requires us to restore all waters to \u201cgood\u201d status \u2013 a minimum EU and national legal requirement. <\/p>\n