Water security needs our urgent attention

JUST hours before Irish Water reminded us yesterday morning how very precarious our water supply is and that just under half — 49% — of the water processed for drinking in the State is lost because of endemic leaks in a dilapidated system, researchers at Columbia University warned that America’s south-west and the Great Plains will face decade-long droughts far worse than any experienced over the last 1,000 years because of climate change.

The juxtaposition of those two pieces of information points to so many pressing problems, most of them manmade, that it would be worse than foolish to pretend that immediate and forceful action is not needed on a number of fronts — even if all earlier efforts to recognise and deal with those realities have been far less successful than they ought to have been.

On the national front, the failure by government after government to ensure that water supply infrastructure was developed to keep pace with social and industrial demand has left us in a terrible position.