This timeline focuses on the developments of water and environmental policy in Ireland that have been significant to Group Water Schemes (GWSs) and their development. It intersperses important historical events that have contributed to the direction that many GWSs have taken with respect to rationalisation and amalgamation in the last 20 years.

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.

For many this situation was untenable. In the mid-1950s, following the rural electrification schemes of the previous decade, group and regional water schemes were increasingly considered as viable strategies to deliver water to rural areas. In 1957, Father Joe Collins developed the first GWS in Oldcourt. However, lack of funding curtailed early efforts to expand on his example. In 1959, piped water supplied only 9% of farms and only 12% of rural households. We have created timelines of this history from the 1950s to the present.

Campaigns developed to extend the delivery of piped water to improve rural quality of life but they faced resistance from farmers who feared increased costs. Different groups, such as the Irish Countrywoman’s Association (ICA) and the Electricity Supply Board (ESB) charted campaigns to convince farmers and others that piped water had many benefits, particularly through private wells and groups schemes. Some examples of these arguments about an increased quality of rural life and better yields from dairy cows are in this pamphlet from the ESB.

From the ESB Archives

Farmers’ concerns eventually gave way to the economic benefits of piped water and local cooperatives used these government grants to develop schemes over the next several decades. GWSs developed first in regions looking to attract rural tourism in the 1960s. By the 1970s, however, Ireland had been included in the European Economic Community. New pressures to develop industrial-scale agriculture helped drive new interest in developing GWSs.

Despite the state’s initial investment, GWSs operated outside of state oversight until the late 1990s and early 2000s. This would change when the EU would see the Irish State as responsible for poor water quality, even in private suppliers. Reports in the 1990s showed that many supplies were failing water quality standards, and by the end of the century, it was clear that the EU was going to require the Irish government to take notice. Thus, since 1998, the Rural Water Programme has funded water treatment upgrades, research, and restructuring of GWSs to help address these concerns. Moreover, in 1997, the National Federation of Group Water Schemes (NFGWS) was established as a representative body for GWSs and has advocated for increased funding and research.

GWSs are uniquely situated within the Irish water sector given their adaptations over the past 20 years to economic, political and environmental pressures. GWSs bundled, amalgamated, and upgraded. They entered into 20-year Design, Build, Operate (DBO) contracts, with significant funding from the Rural Water Programme. Partnering with industry and academia, they have engaged in pilot projects to implement innovative strategies to protect source water, identify leaks, and manage the supply networks.

Through these changes, GWSs have also sought to maintain their identity as community water suppliers while also professionalising parts of their operations. Some GWSs, with the help of the NFGWS and government funds, have hired part-and full-time staff and managers. At the same, they have continued to rely upon local knowledge and labor, many volunteers have participated in training in topics such as quality assurance. For example, in one scheme we visited, while meter readings could be automated, this GWS prefers reading the meters by hand, allowing them to annually spot check connections and to be seen and known by their water users.

GWSs have not navigated these developments in a vacuum. Their recent history is even more interesting given significant restructuring to the public water system. In 2014, the public water supply, which had previously been managed by local authorities, was consolidated into the semi-state utility called Irish Water. Irish Water introduced water charges and metering into the public water supply (both would later be reversed), techniques that GWSs had already long been using as part of their water delivery. A microcosm of changing relationships to water, infrastructure and the state, GWSs have much to show us about broader happenings in our economy, culture, and environment.

We visited one treatment facility operated by Veolia during our trip to Monaghan in July 2018 that helps supply water to more than 500 households. Located downstream from the group’s reservoir, two concrete water containers dominated the small and gated facility. When we arrived, we were the only ones there. Automated equipment monitors the treatment process most of the time on its own, although these facilities are regularly checked. While the facility hummed along without supervision, a warning sign at the facility’s gate and a bright yellow safety shower for chemical hazards signaled that the space was not completely benign. Indeed, boxes of bottles and chemicals necessary for water treatment were stacked in the control house.

Veolia is a transnational corporation and a major provider of these services and employs the staff who monitor these sites. The terms of the contracts that GWSs entered into as part of DBOs have been significant to GWS activities. In many cases, the private water service firms are only contracted to treat raw water that meets a certain quality. If the quality of the raw water supplied by the GWS dips below that level, it becomes the responsibility of GWSs. When DBO schemes were designed, GWSs and DBO companies did not have a historical record of raw water testing. Moreover, GWSs and the Irish state were under significant pressure from the EU to upgrade water treatment plants quickly. This meant that the number of water samples used to design some DBOs was limited. Particularly in places that face seasonal variability in their source water quality, this led to the redesign of plants once some of the challenges that such variability poses were identified.

DBO contracts have become one important incentive for GWSs to improve and maintain the quality of their source waters. This experience (and subsequent knowledge and data gained about water quality and chemistry) also means that GWSs will be in a stronger position to negotiate new contracts with the likes of Veolia when the current 20-year cylce comes to an end over the next few years.