GRASSING ON YOUR NEIGHBOUR?

WELL, would you do it? If you looked out your back window and saw a neighbour merrily hosing down their parched lawn, would you – pun intended – grass them up?

Along with the hosepipe ban, Irish Water says anyone wishing to report ‘excessive use’ can call its helpline – that means the neighbour with the suspiciously green and dewy lawn, the new 7,000-litre paddling pool or the powerhosed drive.

The hosepipe ban kicked in yesterday and will last for at least a month, making it illegal to roll out a hose for almost any purpose until early August at least.

Oddly enough, there’s nothing to stop you filling the 7,500-litre pool with buckets, if you have the energy or the manpower, or even watering your lawn from a watering can. And if you’ve got fish in your garden pond, their rights will be respected throughout the drought and you can keep topping them up as required.

But no, if you’re caught using a hose to fill a paddling pool for your toddlers, there’s probably no point trying to convince the Irish Water spies that they’re not actually children at all, they’re those strange exotic fish, the cute pink ones with the big eyes and the little feet that they’ve located off the Kerry coast. Just wearing swim diapers, arm bands and factor 50 sun cream.

The water utility may not need to rely solely on the famous ‘officious bystander’ to report water waste, since it’s likely that the controversial meters will also be used to monitor domestic consumption. But the question still remains: after the Taoiseach called on us all to ‘do the right thing’ during the water shortages, does that extend to reporting your neighbours if you see them breaking the rules?

An online poll yesterday found that 65% said they wouldn’t grass up a neighbour, with just 23% saying they would, and the rest sitting on the fence (and keeping a suspicious eye on next door’s garden, no doubt). But if this heatwave continues as predicted, with little sign of any significant rainfall in the foreseeable future, I wonder just how long this admirable neighbourliness will endure.

Much as I resent having to conserve water, considering that I tried to pay for a decent and reliable service only to have my cheque sent back by Irish Water, I’ve been doing my bit to cut our household usage over the past week.

I’ve put bricks in the toilet cisterns and basins in the sink to save any waste for the garden, and I’ve been watering my poor gasping bay trees with cooled pasta water.

Shower usage is strictly monitored – nobody can stay in for longer than it takes to play two songs on their various devices, so long as those songs aren’t Bohemian Rhapsody and American Pie. The washing machine is set on a ‘quick wash’ function, and the dishwasher is stacked like a Jenga game.

I’ve never taken water for granted, even when it’s plentiful – in a world where water is so scarce for so many, it always strikes me as prodigal that we flush our toilets with purified drinking water of a quality high enough to bottle and sell. Listening to my city friends, including Philip Nolan of this parish, reminisce about their summer of 1976, I realise that farmers’ children like myself have very different memories of heatwaves and droughts of bygone summers.

Urban kids don’t appreciate that it’s to us country mice they owe their long summer holidays. Farmers’ children were needed to help out on saving the hay, in pre-silage days, and that was a labourintensive exercise where the weather was a constant concern. The meadows needed plentiful rainfall to grow the grass, but the hay could only be cut on dry days.

Lethal

Then it required plenty of sunshine to dry it out, because rain would rot it on the ground. It had to be tossed and piked to help it dry before it could be baled. Then bales had to be stacked in a certain way to prevent rain running into their cores, and finally, late in the holidays, they had to be gathered on to trailers and brought in to be stored in sheds. All of this was hot, tiring work that stretched from dawn to dusk when the weather was just right, and even the smallest children were expected to help out.

One of my jobs was to go around the edge of the meadow with a pitchfork and raise the flattened grass so that the mowing machine could scoop it up – while staying out of the way of the lethal moving jaws of the mower. The poor, foolish, sunbathing frogs weren’t always that lucky, though, and their mutilated corpses gave off a most distinctive whiff as they baked in the heat. Smells have a magically evocative power and, many years later, when I first tried fried frogs’ legs in a French restaurant, that same unmistakeable aroma instantly transported me to a hay field in a long-gone Irish summer. I had to send them back – they looked and smelled far too familiar – and have never touched them since. And then there were cows to be milked, in peak milk production season, but their output depended on plentiful water. The milk had to be cooled, in churns and tanks, with flowing water, and there was no public water supply to keep it coming. So when our well ran dry, as it often did, we’d load barrels onto a trailer and travel to a nearby spring, where the coldest, sweetest water bubbled straight up from the centre of the earth, and fill our barrels bucket by bucket.

When you’ve a memory of doing that, every evening during those seemingly endlessly dry summers of childhood, you’re far more likely to turn off the tap while you brush your teeth, or take showers instead of baths, or boil a kettle to wash up rather than run the tap for ages until the hot water flows, even when there’s no shortages at all.

So, if I’m honest, I can’t say I won’t report water wastage if I see it over the next couple of weeks. Not a once-off, maybe, not a neighbour taking out a hose to water a much-loved and carefully tended rose bush or sprinkle a small patch of burnt-up lawn. But when you’re making every effort, yourself, to conserve water, it’s just galling to watch somebody else squander it without a care.

And, anyway, we know from experience that the only thing that keeps our behaviour in check is the risk of being caught and punished. From speeding or drink driving, to tax dodging or littering, detection and enforcement levels are the best predictors of compliance, not civic-mindedness or personal morality.

If you need proof, look at the dog-fouling problem on city pavements and beaches. There’s little chance of being caught if you refuse to pick up after your pet, so people just walk away all the time – check out that chap on Facebook giving the finger to a passer-by who challenged him to pick his dog’s poop off a Dublin strand recently. If people think they’ll get away with dirty, dangerous or selfish behaviour, some will take the risk.

Water shortages are a fleeting inconvenience for city dwellers but, already, farmers are fearing a winter fodder crisis because there was no rain to make for a second cut of silage. And if the grass doesn’t grow, they’ll soon need to dip into precious stores. Few of us are more than a couple of generations from the land, and a little solidarity wouldn’t go amiss. So I’ll be making no apology for ringing that freephone number, if I see gratuitous waste over the next while.

And I doubt I’ll be alone… bear in mind that there are very few streets or estates where perfect harmony reigns. There are very few neighbourhoods where someone hasn’t crossed someone else, over a boundary, a barking dog, an ugly extension, an untrimmed hedge. So before you decide to break the hosepipe ban, this summer, you’d better be sure that there’s nobody in your neighbourhood with a score to settle…