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.

The title of Dr. Collins’ talk was ‘Where is away?’. He made clear that this was less a geographic question and more of an ethical one: when we push or throw something away, what implications does it have for others? The question wasn’t just directed at individuals who wilfully pollute. Dr. Collins’ used the example of a bathroom. This domestic space is usually associated with cleanliness and health. But many of the cleaning and healthcare products we use, everything from ear buds to shampoo, do not simply disappear when they wash away down the drain. These products, like many more everyday products, carry material traces and residues that are not easily perceptible to us. These residues circulate and accumulate in our environments, our bodies, and the bodies of others. Take the example of microplastics.

Microplastics are particles of plastic less than 5mm in length. This is not the visible plastic waste we are most familiar with – bags, cups, discarded toys. Microplastics are shed by these larger plastic objects as they break down over time. In addition, microbeads, a type of microplastic, are very tiny pieces of manufactured polyethylene plastic that are in health and beauty products, such as some cleansers and toothpastes. They are also found in the synthetic fibers of our clothes.

MN POLLUTION CONTROL AGENCY/FLICKR

Microplastics enter our environments in different, often unexpected ways. ‘Sludge’ is the residue left after our sewage has been treated. It is ‘recycled’ as fertilizer and spread on fields. An EPA study last year found between 4,000-15,000 microplastic pieces per kilogram of sludge from sewage plants. These microplastics are then passed into the soil, rivers, lakes and ultimately back into the drinking water systems and our bodies. The sewage treatment process can also be so effective that it breaks microplastics down into particles that are so small they can be ingested by worms and birds.

Microplastics themselves are not the main risk to human and environmental health. Chemicals and bacteria attach to plastics – this is why plastic pellets are used to clean up oil spills. Once plastic enters the digestive system of a human or animal, the hot, acidic environment causes chemicals on the plastic to leach.

When we think of contaminants in our water and environments it is common to think of them as discrete and isolated, problems we can ‘manage’. Microplastics unsettle this notion. Consider the scale and ubiquity of microplastics. Not only are they found in such large quantities in so many of the everyday products we use and surround ourselves with, they have also been accumulating for decades, and will continue to for decades to come. The smaller they break down the more unsettling this becomes. Microplastics of less than 0.001 mm are small enough to cross into cells and permeate the body. We live in a plastic world whether we like it or not.

What is an adequate response to this situation? This was the question asked of Dr. Collins by one of the conference delegates. It is not a problem easily fixed through infrastructure upgrades – the usual technical remedy for water-related problems. The problem is a global one that revolves around the many, often unknown toxins that are released into the environment without us even thinking about them, pushed away for others to deal with and be exposed to.

One response Dr. Collins proffered was for us to take more responsibility for what we throw away or send away. This was understood by some present as a call for greater individual responsibility, but this wasn’t all he meant. Individual behavioral change is not going to be enough. But neither can we wait for planetary scale intervention. Dr. Collins praised the work that Group Water Schemes were doing in protecting their water sources. This is collective work that begins with the simple but vital recognition that specific bodies of water, a lake, a spring, a river, are always part of much bigger systems and stories – what some call a hydro-social cycle. Connecting the local and the global through this kind of collective work seems a good place to figure out what an adequate response to our contaminated water systems might be.

The National Library of Ireland has preserved the ICA’s archives of these campaigns and holds the transcripts from national conferences and lectures, and guild meeting minutes. The country has been in a long negotiation over the role of women in the Irish State. Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, women’s organisations and activist movements have sought to alter, advocate for, and reshape women’s roles in society. These groups and actions have not always pursued the same objectives and visions; the role, advancement, and place of women in Ireland continues to be debated and contested.

The “Turn on the Tap” for piped rural water is one artifact of women’s advocacy in 20th century Ireland. Thus ICA campaign advocates for women’s quality of life and community needs, but at the same time bases these arguments from a woman’s place as in the home and the division of labor that entailed.

Turn on the Tap

REMEMBER ‘WHAT WOMAN WANTS GOD WANTS’.

LET US ALL REALLY WANT THE WATER

AND WITH THE HELP OF GOD WE WILL GET IT. -ICA Archives

The 1960s ‘Turn on the Tap’ campaign organised lectures, events, advertising and a conference to generate interest and investment in bringing piped water to rural Ireland. Its arguments mostly centered on pipe water’s benefits to rural quality of life. In this respect, the campaign built on the ICA’s arguments for rural electrification. Everyday chores and activities in rural homes would be enhanced by these services. Piped water, and its uses in the home–cooking, washing– were often explicitly linked to the benefits of electrically heated water supplies to women’s quality of life. Access to piped water would replace women’s grueling work hauling water into the home for chores, “Relieving her of much of the drudgery and giving her time for other more creative pursuits.”

Women’s role in the home, and men’s roles in the fields was central to the advocacy the ICA pursued. The ICA targeted benefits to men (with specifics about farm work, pipes, and infrastructure) and at women (with specifics about duties in kitchens and bathrooms). At its conference for the campaign, the centerpiece of the event used a model kitchen designed to illustrate the benefits of piped water, and shine a light on how lives would be improved. As the ICA described in its archives:

“The centre piece is a table over which a light shines down on flowers, books, a fiddle to represent music, and sketching materials to represent art. On each side of the four-sided lamp shade there is one of the following sentences:

“WATER ON TAP GIVES TIME FOR TALENTS 

WATER ON TAP GIVES TIME TO THINK 

WATER ON TAP GIVES BETTER FOOD 

WATER ON TAP GIVES BETTER LIVING” 

In the 1960s, these benefits were featured in pamphlets and educational material that tried to explain and incentive piped water schemes, some of which were produced by the Electrical Supply Board (ESB). The ICA archives have copies of these pamphlets, and the guild meeting minutes detail their explicit and purposeful efforts to target government departments and news publications with their message.

From the ESB Archives

However, as Mary Daly points out in her work on this campaign, ultimately it was not quality of life arguments that tipped the scales and incentivised greater provisioning of government grants to facilitate these rural water schemes. Ultimately the economic arguments about the benefits of rural water convinced, particularly the Department of Agriculture, to invest in rural water supplies. Still, at a time when laws and norms dictated that women’s place was in the home, the ICA records point to women’s efforts to advocate for a better quality of life and more time for women’s leisure, despite overwhelming social and political institutions that restricted their bodies and voices.