When did you last drink from an Irish river? Not think about it, or wish you could do it – actually scoop a cupful of cold water out of a stream, and swallow it without thinking twice?
For most of us, it’s an absurd question. You’d no more drink a sup of the Liffey, the Shannon or the Barrow than you’d get down on your knees and slowly lick a busy footpath. Even if you were dying of thirst at the edge of one of our few remaining gin-clear pristine rivers, every instinct would say no. Clear is not the same as clean, and well we know it; what we can’t see is what stops us.
And yet, within living memory, you could. I’ve written before about Paddy Mackey, a Nenagh man who, as a child, drank straight from Lough Derg – the water was that pure. We have – or more precisely, the policies of successive governments have – in just decades, normalised something that would have struck our grandparents as shocking and utterly broken.
The facts tell the story. In the 1980s about 500 Irish rivers were classed as the very best of the best. Today, there are about 20 – that’s a 96 per cent collapse in a single working life. The Environmental Protection Agency’s Water Quality in Ireland 2019–2024, found that just 52 per cent of our surface waters meet minimum legal standards, meaning that 48 per cent are failing, as are 70 per cent of our estuaries.
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It is a shameful failure of governance and policy, and a collective acceptance of shockingly low standards. On the current trajectory, we haven’t a hope in hell of meeting the 2027 deadline, which requires us to restore all waters to “good” status – a minimum EU and national legal requirement.
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Perhaps part of the problem is the grey language we’re given to think about it all. “Pristine”, “high status”, “poor status”, “achieving Water Framework Directive objectives” – civil servants, consultants and scientists use these terms. For the rest of us they can land with an indifferent, often confused, shrug. What is a “river basin management plan”? What does a river with “moderate status” mean? It sounds like a passable mark, doesn’t it? In fact, it means the river has failed. And while you’re at it, what even is a catchment?
These words don’t make us furious or hopeful. They don’t let us quickly grasp the seriousness of the freshwater failure occurring in our streams, rivers, lakes, and estuaries.
What we need is a better measure. Can we drink from our rivers without vomiting? Can we swim in them without getting diarrhoea? They’re simple acts that should, by right, be possible. Think about your local waterway. Can you do these things? If the answer is no, isn’t it time we started getting impatient and angry about that?
In 2005, aged 24, the Dutch ecologist Li An Phoa canoed Québec’s Rupert River and drank from it with her hands. Three years later, she returned, and by then, a hydroelectric dam was under construction, and locals were getting sick because the water was no longer drinkable. Phoa made a vow that has since become a public movement: Drinkable Rivers, now active in 25 countries, with citizen scientists monitoring water quality from the Meuse to the Danube to the Thames.
Her argument is simple. “Drinkable” isn’t a sentimental wish; it is a bioindicator. A river is only drinkable when the land that drains into it is functioning – when the wetlands are wet, when the banks are vegetated, when farms (the single biggest pressure on Irish water quality) aren’t haemorrhaging nutrient pollution, when wastewater is treated and raw sewage isn’t pouring out, when industry isn’t discharging novel chemicals faster than our regulators can name them. Last week’s news offered a glimpse of that last problem: Swedish scientists released Atlantic salmon into a lake while dosing them at the levels of cocaine already drifting through real rivers. The exposed fish swam up to twice as far as their unexposed counterparts. The strongest effects came not from cocaine itself but from its breakdown products – the molecules regulators rarely even think to look for.
The Swimmable Cities movement is active in 80 cities, accelerated by the cleaning of the Seine for the 2024 Paris Olympics. It’s a powerful and relatable idea. Bring a child anywhere near a river on a warm day, and chances are they won’t ask, “Has this waterway achieved good ecological status under Annex V of the Water Framework Directive?” They’ll simply look up at you and say, hopefully: “Can I swim in it?”
We’re a small, naturally wet country with rich veins of 73,000km of streams and rivers winding through our landscape. Let’s have a drinkable Liffey in our lifetime. A drinkable Shannon, Slaney and Suir; a swimmable Boyne, Barrow and Dodder; a drinkable Avoca, Camac, Suck and Corrib. Let’s set our standards higher than failure, and go for an unambiguous goal; every farm decision, planning permission, wastewater investment, industrial licence and abstraction licence can be measured against a single sentence: does this make our waterways more drinkable and swimmable, or less?
Water is our great truth-teller. You cannot fake your way to a drinkable river. So the next time you’re near a stream, river, lake or estuary, do the test. Can you drink from it? Could you swim in it without getting sick? If the answer is no – and it almost always is – then ask why we’ve allowed that to be normal and acceptable, and what urgently needs to change so that our waters are pure and safe again.
