Taking supplies for granted: Time to change stand on water

The drought has probably, or at least it should have, sharpened our awareness of how dependent we are on a reliable water supply.

Indeed, because of the drought, livestock owners will need an as-yet-unsourced 10m bales of silage over the coming winter.

That is a spectacular figure, but it is no less challenging than the fact, published by Irish Water yesterday, that most of us use twice the amount of water we imagine we use.

Even when water supplies are abundant, that seems a spectacular level of detachment.

At a moment of water crisis, it is indefensible.

Issues around water, and how we fund its protection and supply, have been so well-thrashed out that they have been set to one side.

That, however, does not mean they have been resolved.

The drought has raised, in an unprecedented way, how ever-expanding dairy farming — around 100 litres per cow per day — uses an inordinate proportion of available water supplies.

It would have been impossible to question the practice of drilling private wells to sustain a herd of, say, 500 cows — 50,000 litres a day — before the drought, but maybe that is no longer the case.

Maybe our underground water supplies should be recognised as a national asset, rather than a private resource.

Those using private wells need not fret, though.

Our inability to establish a fair system of charging for water suggests that an issue as thorny as 50,000 litre-a-day private wells will never even be addressed.