As part of the follow-up interviews for the Roscommon community photography project, we had the opportunity to visit various workplaces of the caretaker of Polecat Springs GWS. He showed us some of the nuts, bolts, fittings and joints that he uses, day-to-day, in the ordinary upkeep of the scheme. He showed us the meters that are being installed to monitor usage on the network, and talked us through how this is being done. While a large part of the maintenance work is performed in the caretaker’s shed, at the scheme’s treatment facility, and out-and-about on the network, this is not the only place from which the GWS is overseen. Polecat Springs have installed bulk meters connected to a SCADA system, which allows water usage and network integrity to be monitored remotely. The caretaker has an old laptop dedicated exclusively to this task. This lives in his home, allowing him to keep track of things with ease and comfort. Reading the levels at different locations and times of the day demands a significant knowledge of the scheme and the software, but helps the caretaker to take a prompt and directed response to most problems that arise.

Peake Mantua was established in the 1970s. Like all private schemes installed at that time, it serviced a small number of houses and farms with untreated water. Water was sourced from a nearby spring, where locals would sometimes gather to drink, swim and play. With time, the quality of water at the source declined and chlorine treatment was added. In the 2000s, with assistance from the Roscommon County Council and funding from the Rural Water Programme, Peake Mantua purchased and had installed a sand filter and a UV treatment chamber. Remedial works were undertaken at the source, enclosing the spring with a concrete cover to prevent plant and animal growth from clogging up the pumps and pipes.

As other Group Water Schemes in the area entered into service contracts with third-party providers—under the Design, Build and Operate bundling programme of the late noughties—Peake Mantua elected to remain independent. The pride members have for the scheme underscored a desire to maintain control of its management and maintenance. The challenge they face in achieving this is not technical but social.

Despite its size, Peake Mantua have equipment similar to what can be found at a state-of-the-art facility. This was perhaps one of the most surprising and inspiring things about the scheme. The equipment in the images in the gallery above is not too dissimilar from what can be found at other Group Water Schemes, only much smaller and more tightly arranged. State funding and support have allowed the scheme to purchase facilities that are, for the most part, sufficient to their needs.

Peake Mantua is, however, unable to pay its caretaker. Time given to maintaining the treatment facility and distribution network is voluntary. The caretaker is a relatively young man and has another, full-time job, working in a technical capacity for the Irish military. It is only on the weekend that he is able to work for the GWS. Despite this, he has slowly developed the knowledge and expertise needed to keep the facility running. This includes things, such as changing the spent bulb of the UV treatment chamber, that other schemes employ private contractors to undertake.

So long as the scheme have someone willing to perform this work, then their relative independence remains feasible. The worry expressed to us, however, is that too few of the scheme’s members are interested doing this and that in time, this may become an issue.

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.