On Tuesday 16th July, we visited the Michael Davitt Museum. The Museum is a community enterprise project housed in a pre-penal Church in the beautiful village of Straide, Co. Mayo. As the curator of the museum told us as we arrived, the museum runs almost entirely off the €5 entrance fee it charges visitors (which includes a short film, coffee or tea, and a free pass to visit the Ceide fields). There were several people in and out of the museum, including the man who gave us a tour, who were keen to host us.  The feel of the place and the people – the care taken, the pride in what it stood for – was reminiscent of Group Water Schemes we have visited.

Michael Davitt is most famous for his role in establishing the Land League in the 1870s. He was a social reformer and his politics were radical, calling for an end to Landlordism and collective ownership of land. He was born in Straide but his family were evicted during the famine. They moved to Haslingden, a town just outside Manchester where there was work in the cotton mills. Like so many, Davitt and his family were victims twice – driven off the land and then forced to work under terrible conditions in the factories. Davitt started work in the cotton mills at the age of 9, working 12 hour shifts. At the age of 11 he had his right arm amputated after it was caught and mangled in a cogwheel. He didn’t receive any compensation but the owner of the cotton mill decided to pay for Davitt’s education in a local Weslyan school. Davitt learnt to read and write. In 1857 he had begun working again but by night took evening classes in the Mechanics’ Institute, and here learnt about Irish history.

Earlier in the day we visited a Group Water Scheme in Roscommon. A farmer who was passing on his tractor stopped to talk to us as he remembered when the scheme was set up in the late 1970s. We talked about the challenges facing the scheme and various issues affecting the water quality. The caretaker of the scheme said that the greatest threat was the loss of people: ‘without people you have no water scheme’. This led to a conversation about what it was that was causing the loss of people. The farmer was clear: it was Government policy favouring the expansion of big dairy farms and big forestry plantations. He also talked about everything else that was being closed – post offices, small farms, hospitals. Rural Ireland was becoming an impossible place to live. It wasn’t the first time we have heard this but it was hard not to recall it as we heard about Davitt and the Land League, particularly the campaigns to stop the expansion of grasslands for cattle.

Something we hadn’t appreciated about Davitt, or the Land League, was the extent to which they were connected to international struggles and movements of the time. Along the bottom of one of the posters was a small verse calling for solidarity between peasants, landworkers and indigenous peoples from North America to Peru to Australia. Davitt was an international figures – apparently his strategies of peaceful resistance influenced Gandhi. One side of the museum was covered with documents and artifacts illustrating the extent of Davitt’s travels and recogntion. In Australia, his visits brought tens of thousands of people out on to the streets. Some of the posters marking the events appear handmade.

Outside the Museum there is a recently installed memorial plaque to mark the events of 1966 when farmers demanded rights and marched to Dublin. We asked a man about the memorial and he told us it had been put there by the Mayo branch of the IFA and that it had been controversial. Davitt, he said, would not have supported the big farmers today who are represented by the IFA. He fought for an end to Landlordism so that collective land ownership could be instituted, ensuring a fair livelihood for tenant farmers.

After the Museum we stopped by Moore Hall on the way to a Community Catchment meeting in Partry. The old walled garden had been bare back in February when we last visited and diggers had been moving the earth in preparation for some development. It was like a different place now in mid-summer, full of purple loosestrife and bright green growth. The scene was hopeful.

It has been a couple of months since we were last down at Lough Carra. The changes are remarkable – mid-summer and the foliage is dense and green, the thick hedges smattered with purple vetch and wild roses. Hay is being cut, or out to dry. Many of the fields were a bright, uniform green and from a far even seemed to glow. We have learnt a lot over the course of this project about how these green fields are not as benign as they may seem. The green glow is a healthy sign for a certain type of farmer – it means more grass, more productivity. But maintaining this level of productivity involves heavy inputs of organic and inorganic chemicals, in the form of slurry, inorganic fertilizers, and herbicides. The soil can’t absorb all these chemicals. The excess has to go somewhere, migrating through ditches, rivers, and underground, until much of it arrives in the lake.

Eutrophication is when excess nutrients (namely phosphorus and nitrogen) generate intense plant growth in a body of water. The origin of the word is Greek – eutrophus, or ‘well-fed’. We saw signs of eutrophication on this trip – particularly in the choked rivers and streams that feed the lake. Two things that people most often refer to when describing changes on the lake over the past two decades are the increase in reeds, and the changing colour of the lake – the mottled surface of light and dark blue which indicates the growth of weeds on the white marl bottom, and a green tinge to the water from algae. The presence of reeds and the changing composition of the lake’s colour evidence an over-abundance of nutrients. Another, less easily detectable sign of eutrophication in the lake is a change in biodiversity. When plant growth in the lake dies back, bacteria consume dissolved oxygen as they break down the organic matter. This affects the ecology of the lake in complex ways. The mayfly is particularly sensitive to oxygen depletion, and was, at least, an important source of food for the lake fish. Once ‘like locusts in May’, we were told, the mayfly are now hard to find. In Carra, the build-up of nutrients has undoubtedly affected the lake but these affects have not been documented and are hard to demonstrate conclusively. Nor are they the outcome of a single, discrete event, but rather the creeping  manifestation of a slow, extended process that is hard to pinpoint or resolve.

Earlier this year, the NFGWS shared with us a selection of their data for 348 GWSs. It includes attributes for geographical location, number of domestic connections, source type and whether or not the scheme is in a Design, Build and Operate (DBO) contract with a third-party provider such as Glan Agua or Veolia. The data has been mapped and visualised below using Mapbox. A full-screen version of the map is accessible here.

Even from this simple thematic map some interesting things about GWSs can be identified.

Firstly, outside Counties Cavan, Mayo and Monaghan, the vast majority of group water schemes abstract their water from groundwater sources, such as boreholes and springs. In County Mayo, many schemes source their water from lakes, however due to the predominance of karst limestone in this part of the country, these water systems should be regarded as mixed surfacewater and groundwater.

Secondly, many of the groundwater schemes have a smaller number of domestic connections than do the surfacewater schemes. While there are many springs in the country with a high flow rate, wells and boreholes will typically have a far lower yield, meaning that less connections can be supported.

Finally, many of these smaller groundwater schemes (particularly between Galway and Wexford) are not currently in a DBO contract. The NFGWS have informed us that one of the biggest challenges presently facing the sector is that many smaller schemes are struggling to manage their network and maintain water quality. Without a consistent, high-yield source it is not always feasible for a GWS to enter into a DBO contract. In such instances, the NFGWS is encouraging schemes to rationalise their management structures and where possible amalgamate their physical networks.

This is detective work on a scale unimaginable to most detectives, with the notable exception of Sherlock Holmes, who was, with his discoveries and interpretations of little bits of grit from Blackheath or Hampstead, the first forensic geologist, acknowledged as such by geologists to this day. Holmes was a fiction, but he started a branch of science; and the science, with careful inference, carries fact beyond the competence of invention. Geologists, in their all but closed conversation, inhabit scenes that no one ever saw, scenes of global sweep, gone and gone again, including seas, mountains, rivers, forests, and archipelagoes of aching beauty rising in volcanic violence to settle down quietly and then forever disappear—almost disappear. (McPhee 1981, pp. 81–82)

Beneath the towns and fields of the Irish Midlands lies a vast and largely unmapped volume of fractured limestone. In speaking to its origins, geologists evoke time scales that sit uneasily with the patterns of everyday life (Meehan & Parkes, 2014). 400 to 300 million years ago, Northwest Europe was pushed down by tectonic forces and covered with water. The coral reefs and other life forms that lived in this shallow, tropical sea must have been plentiful, for when they died their bodies sank down to the sea floor and, with time and pressure, were pressed into a rock layer hundreds of meters thick. As the millennia passed, Ireland drifted northward and new geologies were laid upon the old, sometimes persisting but usually eroding away. Warmer stretches of weather meant higher levels of rainfall, accelerating the processes of erosion. Cracks, gaps and fissures were opened in the Carboniferous limestone, allowing water to percolate down and leading to further chemical dissolution. Slowly but surely, much of Ireland’s 30,000 km² of lowland limestone was transformed into a varied and complex karstic landscape (Drew 2008).

Karst is soluble rock (such as limestone, marble and gypsum) that has developed into an extensive underground system of passages and caves. This subsurface labyrinth allows water to move in fast and often unpredictable ways, posing all sorts of challenges for drinking water management (Coxon, 2014). In order to understand why this is so, it is necessary to reflect on the many mysteries of karst.

Karst landscapes are dependent on the local geological processes that produce them. Nevertheless, certain features are repeated and have been recognised by the Geological Survey of Ireland (GSI) (see also Todd & Mays 2005). Dolines are enclosed depressions in the land where water is able to infiltrate the epikarst, often carrying with it nutrients from the surface. These can collapse into sinkholes or swallow holes, which can, in turn, act as major sites of ingress into the underlying aquifer. Sinking streams lose water into the ground, causing their total volume and flow rate to decrease as they progress. Once it has entered into the epikarst, water moves through cracks and caves before re-emerging or settling into the aquifer. A spring is a natural point of discharge, where the water table intersects with the surface topography. Spring flows can vary due to changing weather conditions, particularly rainfall levels. Turloughs are disappearing lakes, which form and then retreat as the water level moves up and down with the seasons. The spring that produces a turlough might, at a different time of year, become a swallow hole. When a karst feature enables both water infiltration and discharge it is referred to as an estevelle. Together these terms form the basis for the GSI’s classification scheme, which shapes what Irish geologists perceive, measure and record during their fieldwork.

In early October, we participated in the annual field trip of the Irish Group of the International Association of Hydrogeologists (IAH). This year’s trip was to County Roscommon, where the GSI are currently undertaking a groundwater protection pilot for the National Federation of Group Water Schemes. Over the course of the day, we visited a handful of karst features in the area that have a bearing on local water quality. The Carrowreagh swallow hole, pictured below, was one such feature. It was obscured by heavy plants and shrubs, making it difficult to see from the nearby road. Without an intimate knowledge of the land, it would be easy to drive past it every day without knowing what it was. Cows grazed in the fields immediately surrounding the swallow hole, moving freely into and out of the stream which fed it. Nearby, two houses lay unoccupied, legacies of the Celtic tiger.

Geologists have used a method called dye tracing to determine where water entering the Carrowreagh swallow hole re-emerges. A dye poured into the hole was detected four days later, discharging from a spring in Cloonyquin, some 7 kilometres away. But without further testing, geologists cannot be sure that this is the only path that water will follow. When the water table is at a different level, say at a different time of year, the water might return to the surface elsewhere. Furthermore, there is no guarantee that the underlying karst structure will remain the same. Rubbish, organic material and sediments can clog up its underground passageways. Further erosion or structural collapse can open up others.

Karst features make for complex interactions between the surface water and groundwater. This leads to uncertainties and unknowabilities about the movements of water, and the origins of the nutrients and contaminants that it carries. It has been estimated that 20–25% of the world’s population depends upon karst aquifers for their water (Ford & Williams 2007). In Roscommon, many of the Group Water Schemes abstract from naturally formed springs and upwellings. These provide a constant source of water, but are highly susceptible to contamination from agriculture and poorly fitted septic tanks. New wells may be able to help, if they could be bored in such a way that water is drawn out from beneath the karst aquifer, where slower processes are likely to filter or bypass many of the contaminants. Efforts to achieve this in the area, however, have so far been unsuccessful.

The water management problems posed by karst were made clear to us during the IAH field trip. Several years ago at the Ogulla Spring, a water source for the Mid-Roscommon Group Water Scheme, a large rainfall brought a high concentration of nutrients into the water immediately upstream of the abstraction point. This lead to an algal bloom, which had catastrophic consequences for the quality of the water. Witnesses spoke of an unbearable stink to the site, that made it difficult to be around, let alone drink from. The pump was turned off for six months as the local ecosystem recovered. While it is possible to speculate about how this occurred, there are enough mysteries about the movement of water through the ground that it is impossible to know for sure. Enacting changes to prevent this from recurring is possible, but a targeted response will require further efforts to decipher the area’s underlying karst system.

The website of the Geological Survey of Ireland is a fantastic resource on karst geology and ground water protection. The series on ‘Understanding Irish karst’ is a great place to start. More on the dye tracing conducted in Roscommon can be found in an article on the ‘Rathcroghan Uplands’, and for those willing to dig into the details, take a look at the ‘County Groundwater Protection Schemes’.

References

– Drew, David P. (2008). Hydrogeology of lowland karst in Ireland. Quarterly Journal of Engineering Geology and Hydrogeology, 41, 61–72.
– Coxon, Catherine. (2014). Water quality in Irish karst aquifers. In Proceedings of the 34th Annual Groundwater Conference, International Association Of Hydrogeologists (Irish Group). Tullamore, Co. Offaly, Ireland. April 15–16, 2014.
– Ford, Derek, & Williams, Paul W. (2007). Karst hydrogeology and geomorphology (Revised Edition). Chichester: John Wiley & Sons.
– McPhee, John. (1981). Basin and Range. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.
– Meehan, Robert, & Parkes, Matthew. (2014). Karst, Turloughs and Eskers: The geological heritage of County Roscommon. Roscommon: Roscommon County Council.
– Todd, David Keith, & Mays, Larry W. (2005). Groundwater Hydrology (Third Edition). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

In Ireland, integrated catchment management (ICM) is a dominant approach to water management. ICM manages water by integrating ecological factors with social, political, and economic ones to understand what affects water quality within a ‘catchment’ (an area from which water flows into a water body). Data problems, however, can limit the extent of this approach. When we explored publicly available data on economic and social factors that impact water quality to better contextualise the catchments in our field sites, we found it trickier to draw meaningful conclusions than we anticipated.

1. Boundaries do not align

The first problem we encountered: it is difficult to make the data speak to each other. This issue is rooted in boundaries that do not line up. Boundary issues in water management was a problem that the 2000 EU Water Framework Directive (WFD) sought to redress. Previously, water management occurred through political boundaries. While convenient, political boundaries do not reflect the ways that water flows and were deemed insufficient management units. The WFD replaced political boundaries with hydrological ones, precipitating Ireland’s shift towards ICM. However, these political boundaries are those used to classify most available social and economic data. Political, social, and economic data is often available by county, but often county lines do not match up with catchment boundaries.

In this example, toggling on ‘ROI counties’ brings up a spatial layer that represents Ireland’s counties. Three county lines intersect Lough Ree, the large water body featured in the map. Click on ‘WFD Catchments’ and zoom out to bring up a layer that shows the boundaries of the catchment. Here, the catchment border encompasses the lake rather than transecting it. Importantly, three county datasets intersect the catchment of the lake. No one data set is representative of the catchment and reflects information drawn from a much wider area. The incompatibility of spatial units is a common geographical problem that impedes our ability to draw conclusions about what is going on in the catchment. It also highlights one difficulty in achieving ICM. It is hard to take an integrated view of a catchment if you do not have the data to consider economic, social, and political factors across comparable boundaries.

2. Regional Units and Drivers of Pollution

Another issue is the aggregation of data to higher-order spatial units. While counties are a commonly used boundary, certain data types are only made available at the regional level. This is the case for the data the Central Statics Office (CSO) provides regarding one important source of water pollution: agricultural activities.

We wanted to know: What kinds of animals have been raised? What kinds of plantings have dominated? What kinds of agricultural incomes have been generated? However, much of the agricultural data are made publicly available using a standardised regional system used in the EU. NUTS (the Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics) classifications serve important functions by enabling comparisons to be made across Europe and is used funding allocations.

NUTS regions are tiered and based on population. In Ireland, NUTS1 is the entire country, NUTS2 is made up of 3 regions, and NUTS3 is made up of 8 regions each comprised of 1-5 counties (see table, adapted from the CSO). You can see how these regional classifications align with catchment and county boundaries in the map below.

3. Units and boundaries change over time

Under EU Regulation, NUTS boundaries must remain static for at least three years. When NUTS boundaries periodically change (due to changes in population, etc.), the CSO revises older data to ensure comparability across time. However, some of the data from much older datasets reflect regional groupings that were commonplace before NUTS gained a legal footing in 2003. For example, data from 1980-1999 on Farm Land Utilisation are based on a different 5-region classification. These regions do not match those used in data sets for more recent time periods and fragments our understanding of past conditions. By not being able to make comparisons across time, it can be more difficult to trace the drivers of pollution and their impacts on water quality. This is particularly so where impacts may accrue slowly over time, and as land use changes from industry and development intensify, putting new pressures on the environment. We’ve used our policy timelines to try to help recover some of these longer histories with different kinds of data sources.

4. Politics and multiple spatial units in water management

There are many other boundaries at play in water management; these can change over time. The WFD introduced River Basin Districts (RBDs) as expansive spatial units to manage water resources, accounting for the hydrological cycle. However, the RBDs introduced under the 1st River Basin Management Plan (RBMP) (2009-2014) were significantly changed under the 2nd RBMP (2018-2021). Most dramatically, the 2nd RBMP merged 5 RBDs into one national RBD, changes justified by the water governance problems posed by the RBDs classified under the 1st RBMP. The differences between the 1st RBMP and the 2nd RBMP can be seen by clicking on RBMP 1 and RBMP 2 in the final map. The recent history of RBDs signals just how complicated it is to rethink water governance, and how hydrological boundaries can also be political ones.

As we investigated different data sources that could tell us something about the catchments in our field sites, we realised that there are many different spatial units that shape how water is studied and governed. For example,

• Nested hydrological geographies such as Catchments and Sub-catchment
• Areas for Action that the Local Waters Program are using to prioritise research and initiatives to improve water quality
• Political boundaries such as Counties and Regions
• EPA data that characterise individual water bodies around different measures
• RBDs that organise governance structures

These boundaries intersect and overlap with one another, as visible in the final map.

Trying to understand what has been going on in the catchment from the data that has been collected over decades requires understanding the relationship between these different geographies, the data available according to these geographies, and their limitations. Significantly, approaching catchment management in a more integrated way requires reconsidering how we gather and produce data, and the boundaries and geographies we use to do that. Moreover, however imperfect, statistical data still only offers one way of understanding catchments. How people experience catchments by living and working in them are geographies that our fieldwork seeks to draw out and which elicits more textured and layered understandings of what is going on in a catchment than the partial stories other data present.

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CSO: Information Note for Data Users: revisions to the Irish NUTS 2 and NUTS 3 Regions.; Eurostat: History of Nuts; River Basin Management Plan, 2018-2021; OSI: NUTS2 – Generalised 100m, NUTS3 – Generalised 100m, County Boundary Generalised 20m – OSi National Statutory Boundaries; EPA: EPA GeoData Portal Catchments Package, River Basin Management Plans

Group Water Schemes (GWSs) in Ireland and located in predominantly rural areas which are dominated by agriculture. Efforts to manage water supplies in these places requires understanding agricultural demands and practices, particularly where farmers use water from supplies and where their agricultural activities can negatively impact the quality of GWSs source waters. But agriculture is more than an economic activity. It is an important part of rural life and many rural identities. We went to the ploughing competitions to better understand – in a small way – how water, agriculture, and rural living, are imbricated with one another.

The National Ploughing Competition is an annual event that was held over three days in Screggan, Co. Offaly. It drew 1,700 vendors and estimates of just under 250,000 visitors this year despite one day being rescheduled due to treacherous weather conditions and damaging winds. While the event focuses on rural life, it is widely subscribed to across Ireland.

The national news media, RTÉ, broadcasts from the event on TV and radio; the train I took from Dublin’s Heuston Station and bus from Tullamore Station – both modes of transport put on specifically for this event – were packed with lively competition goers.

The event itself is vast. The main grounds are gridded into a city, with events and vendors grouped thematically. To the edges of the main grounds are the ploughing competitions, where tractors and their drivers competed against one another in a persistent rain that lasted all day. Tractors are classed by vintage, county and the age of the driver and the competitions are closely monitored by officials of the National Ploughing Association. Even in the rain, small crowds gathered to watch.

The event caters to interests beyond ploughing. Abundant choices for shopping (cars, clothes, and GAA sports equipment), country music, and fair food were tucked among commercial vendors with products catered to the agricultural industry. Political parties and government agencies handed out literature about their activities vied for attention with vendors that catered to Ireland’s largest agricultural sectors: beef and dairy.

Vendors had a lot on offer: pamphlets described nutrient supplements to increase cow gut-health and weight gain, animal pens show-cased bulls whose genetic material was for purchase, and digital technology trackers were demoed to show how heat sensors could track cows during mating. Much of the event centred on cows.

Many of the vendors specialized in water services to increasing water delivery to animals and reduce the costs of water delivery. Water is central to agriculture; its benefits on herd size and dairy production were central in the justifications of group water schemes and rural water delivery more generally. These issues surrounding water have not gone away.

Vendors catered to a whole set of concerns that embroiled agricultural policies and water delivery. Many of the vendors I spoke with were providing technologies, goods and services that sought to deal with two issues: 1) a push to expand herd sizes in the last decade which requires farmers deliver more water to animals and 2) regulations that restricted animals from waterways and required farmers find alternative water sources for their animals, namely pumping water into water troughs.

“The bigger the herd…the bigger the pipe size”

Philmac, a company that supplies agricultural pipes, justifies its business in a dependent relationship between herd size and pipe size. Pipes with wider diameters, for Philmac, allow more water to be more quickly supplied to more animals. Philmac advocated that farmers switch from ¾ inch pipes to 1 ½ inch pipes—allowing water troughs to be filled more quickly. Other companies took a different approach to supply water, offering their flow rates as faster, their fittings and connections stronger, with demonstrations tanks and text pipes.

To get water into the pipes, farmers need pumps, often supplied by separate companies, when they are pumping water directly from water sources.

These pumps may also need to be powered; in the case of Solar Pump Solutions, solar panels are used to deliver the power necessary to pump water to the animals in areas without electrical hookups. As with other technologies, these products are marketed to lower costs and increase the profitability of animal-based agriculture. And, like many others, featured cows on their brochures.

Water has to be piped somewhere. Hence, cement vendors dedicated exhibits to displaying water troughs for the water.

Water supplies do not always come from waterways. In addition to being connected to public and group water mains, some farmers may choose to develop their own supply from a well—something that anecdotally was mentioned as a growing concern following this year’s drought and water restrictions. Ellis Water Well Drilling bills its services as a cost-saving measure to supply farms with more water. On several of its leaflets and signage, the company explains to prospective customers how to access government grants for wells, when meeting certain requirements.

All of these vendors were talking to people when I arrived at their stands. I found prospective customers eagerly discussing different options, looking at equipment, and taking brochures and other information. While not wholly indicative of the application of these services on farms, there was certainly interest in how to improve water management in animal-based agriculture. For our work and interest in source water quality for drinking water supplies, how water and land are managed, and if and how this translates into agricultural pollution in source water, is an important.

So why did we go to the ploughing competition? The event offered a unique look into the way policies—agricultural and environmental – intersect with real-world practices and industries and manifested at this major cultural event for rural Ireland, all of which have ramifications for the management of water supplies in Ireland.

Inadequate drinking water – an issue of both water quality and water quantity – presents a public health imperative requiring comprehensive action. Recognising that many people lack access to clean drinking water, the 6th UNSDG, clean water and sanitation, has several aims, including to enhance the work of local communities in water and sanitation management. Our project seeks to understand the contexts and relationships that shape how community-managed water suppliers deliver clean drinking water to rural parts of Ireland.

Water scarcity and water quality are issues that cut across different contexts. While our project is focused in Ireland, the challenges of addressing clean water and sanitation are vast and varied. Attention to clean water and sanitation has often centred on challenges in the global south, where basic water infrastructure may be absent and many face life-threatening disease from their waters’ quality. Yet, increasingly contamination events and water shortages in the global north have revealed the fissures, oversights and contradictions of drinking water systems, highlighting them as a point of research and intervention. Upgrading water infrastructures is a key element of this work.

However, challenges to providing clean drinking water in Ireland, as in other places, are not just a question of water availability and its adequate treatment but also the legacies of infrastructural (dis)investment, economic policies, and, more fundamentally, the contradictions that exist between growth-led development and sustainable water systems. Water has become a repository of many of our tiniest wastes: traces of our body wash, fake tans, and pharmaceuticals mix with residues from agricultural pesticides and fertilizers. As these artefacts accumulate and mutate over decades, they pose new and expanding challenges to providing clean drinking water. Thus, addressing the 6th UNSDG requires we look beyond just our physical water infrastructures to the social, political, economic and ecological processes that pollute the hydro-social cycle. The  WISDOM Project: Learning from Group Water Schemes (GWSs), led by Dr. Patrick Bresnihan of Trinity’s Department of Geography, unravels such connections by focusing on source water protection undertaken by GWSs.

GWSs developed through local cooperatives and voluntary labour in the 1960s and 1970s in response to the lack of piped water supplies in rural areas in Ireland. Following Ireland’s inclusion in the EEC in 1972, piped water enabled the expansion of animal-based agriculture as the dairy and beef industries industrialised; more water facilitated larger and more productive herds. In the 1990s, however, many GWSs were failing water quality standards. With pressure from the EU, the Irish government provided support to GWSs to upgrade and rationalise their operations to improve water quality by developing new water treatment facilities. Through these projects, however, it became clear that water treatment as not the only issue; source water quality impacts the cost of water treatment. Under the direction of its national representative body, the National Federation of Group Water Schemes, in the last 15 years, many GWSs have been involved in research to understand and remediate the pollution in their water sources.

As our project begins to take shape (we’re in the early stages of research) already the complexities of these source water issues – and why geographers are well-positioned to examine them – has become clear. We’ve learned that source water protection is a question of geology, where different karst landscapes present different challenges for tracing groundwater sources and provide environments where microbiological organisms can survive. We’ve learned that source water protection is a question of boundaries; often polluters within a catchment for a GWSs are not themselves supplied by the GWS and lack incentives to undertake voluntary measures to reduce pollution.  We’ve learned that source water protection is a question of land use policy and practice; intensive and animal-based agriculture is found to be unequivocally the source of certain kinds of pollution, particularly when animals use waterways as direct sources of drinking water and contaminate water with their faeces. Some of the GWS landscapes we have visited look peaceful and still, a calmness that masks policies, ecologies, and geologies that shape the quality of source waters, and that have facilitated agricultural pollution over decades.

The WISDOM project tries to understand these complex relationships between infrastructures, policies, and ecologies that are rooted in long legacies and practices. Although the project focuses on source water protection, this work takes us to unexpected places outside GWSs’ boundaries. In September, we travelled to the National Ploughing Competition to learn about agriculture’s cultural role in rural Ireland. Billed as a celebration of rural life, the competition drew more than a quarter million spectators over three days and hosted 1700 vendors. More than a cultural experience, what we found was that our initial understandings of agricultural sources of source water pollution were too neat and simple. 

In speaking with vendors, we developed new questions about the complexities of protecting water sources water from animals. Regulations that restrict animals from waterways and require farmers to find alternative water sources, namely by pumping water into troughs, requiring a water infrastructure for animals. Companies and products seek to facilitate regulatory compliance and expanding herd sizes incentivised by agricultural policy. Vendors were dedicated to pipes, to concrete troughs, to water pumps, and to electricity to pump the water.
As agricultural policies incentivise increased herd sizes, they incentivise new, and bigger pipes, to draw more water to animals faster. These technologies have to be planned, installed, maintained, and upgraded and all at a cost. Protecting source water is not so simple as installing a fence. As we work to understand how GWSs seek to implement source protection strategies with farmers, many of whom are on GWSs themselves, these complexities of policy and practice have to be explored.

Many group water schemes (GWSs) use bulk and individual meters to monitor water usage across their schemes. In GWSs, meters and technologies that monitor meter readings have been incorporated into the day-to-day upkeep and maintenance of the schemes’ water supplies. Individual water meters provide information to scheme managers and caretakers about water usage at individual connections for both households and commercial/agricultural usage. Bulk water meters provide managers with information on water usage within particular areas. This information is used to help identify areas that require repair and maintenance, and in the case of individual meters, assists in the assessment of fees.

Meters and the technologies that monitor them offer some GWS managers and caretakers different kinds of data about the functioning of their schemes. These, in turn, have impacted some of the ways that managers and caretakers undertake their responsibilities to care for the schemes. Of those we’ve spoken with, the data that these technologies provide have positively changed their work;  managers and caretakers have conveyed a strong appreciation for these devices in the ways they have handled and spoken about them.

In some respects, meters and monitoring technologies have made day-to-day maintenance easier. Bulk meters provide information about the general functioning of a scheme across a given area, but they are not always located in easy to reach places. Bulk meters may be far below ground or located on the side of busy roads, making them difficult to regularly monitor. In recent years, some GWSs have installed telemetry systems on their bulk meters. Telemetry systems provide information about water usage that can be accessed remotely by GWS managers and caretakers through cellphone apps and computer software. This, in turn, has refashioned how managers and caretakers undertake monitoring, maintenance, and upkeep. This IT infrastructure provides real-time information that managers and caretakers incorporate into their day-to-day activities by showing them areas that might be experiencing unusually high usage and that might need further investigation. They can be anywhere but still can keep track of what is going on in the scheme, and respond to problems when they arise.

The managers and caretakers that we’ve spoken with that use these systems have developed a knowledge of and feel for the data that these technologies produce. When they read the usage graphs, managers and caretakers have a sense for the rhythms and flows of their schemes and can spot anomalies in the digital outputs from these systems. Unusual peaks and valleys in usage graphs help managers identify problems – like leaks – and attend to them. In our recent visits to schemes, managers and caretakers have spoken with an enthusiasm about these technologies that has conveyed just how significant these tools have become to their work. The data produced by bulk metering and telemetry systems provide managers with a different way of understanding, relating, and responding to their water infrastructures.

Bulk meters and telemetry systems provide a way of apprehending how a GWS is functioning that differs from the data provided by individual household meters. Individual meters measure and read household and commercial usage for the purposes of assessing fees and identifying leaks. Unlike bulk meters that are monitored regularly, individual meters may only be assessed on a yearly basis. How GWSs have incorporated individual meter reading into to their activities varies, however.

In Mid-Roscommon GWS, individual household meters are read digitally. When we visited Mid-Roscommon GWS, manager Noel Carroll demonstrated for us how he reads meters for the 1800 connections on the scheme. Reading the meter requires going from box to box to read and record the water usage at each connection. It takes around five days for Noel to read all the meters in the scheme, and he does so from inside his car.

Noel uses a handheld device to read each meter. When he drives up to the meter box, the device scans for a signal transmitted from the meter. When the reading is complete, the device chimes, a process that is over in a matter of seconds. This technology is central to how he does this. However, Noel has developed his own efficiencies for reading meters. When the meters were installed, each connection was photographed and recorded, information that is now stored at the GWS’s offices. But Noel has also logged the meters’ locations in his memory. As we drove from house to house, he seemed to know how close he needed to be to each meter to get a reading without leaving his car or turning the car off. Here it is not the technology itself that makes the system efficient, but its combination with Noel’s in-depth knowledge of the scheme.

While many schemes have adopted this technology for individual meter readings, other schemes prefer a different approach. Some schemes use a committee of readers that manually read each meter by opening each meter’s box and reading the output. For these schemes, this approach allows them to visually inspect each meter and gives them the opportunity to speak with the people who live on the scheme. Meter reading offers them an opportunity to build community among those involved with the running of the scheme and those on the scheme. Thus, while these schemes have incorporated meters into their activities, how meters are used, and to what effects, are not uniform.

While meters and technology may have different effects, meanings, and uses, in the cases we have seen in GWSs, they have offered some managers and caretakers different ways of relating to water infrastructures. Importantly, they provide measures of how the scheme is functioning that shapes not only their understandings their water infrastructures but how they care for them.