Water, water everywhere and bottles are getting ever more ginormous

Abrief history of the Irish and water: 7900BC–2002AD nobody in Ireland ever drank water; 2002–2023 Irish people drank some water; 2024 Irish people drank all the water. Let’s go back a few neolithic fields. As far as I am aware, there is no archaeological evidence that our ancient ancestors ever drank water. They certainly wore brooches and used flints and some massive overachiever built a grave that aligned with the winter solstice, but the liquids they consumed were either tea (I can check this with Diarmuid Ferriter next time I see him) or one of the many alcoholic drinks that were available. In Bunratty Castle, they washed their venison down with mead, I’d imagine, while it’s recorded in historically reliable song that poitín was widely distilled in the Hills of Connemara and beyond. But it never occurred to anyone to drink the water. I suppose, with so many intoxicating liquids to choose from, why would they bother?

Fast forward to less ancient history and there’s still no evidence of anyone drinking water. During the Middle Ages, the Liberties area of Dublin was an overcrowded slum with no sanitation but the population was relatively disease-free because of the astonishing amount of beer everyone drank. If they had chanced the water, it would probably have killed them. Water may have been available during the Treaty negotiations but they were in London and there are no accounts of Michael Collins partaking of it. Peig Sayers was surrounded by it, but never once, in all her complaining, did she mention drinking it. I recently did a tour of Kilmainham Jail and I didn’t encounter a single drinking fountain — or any fountain at all, come to think of it.

During my own childhood, word reached us through returning holidaymakers that Spanish people were drinking bottled water and we thought that was the funniest thing we’d heard since Americans started getting their teeth fixed.

When I was a teenager, we had a psychotic Spanish student for a week before he was sent back and during dinner, he grabbed a bottle of white vinegar off the kitchen table and necked it, with hilarious consequences (though not for him). When my sister’s American boyfriend came to Ireland in the last breath of the 20th century, he was stunned at how we didn’t drink water and, parched, he embarked on a nationwide and fruitless search for a ‘soda’, which only ended when a kindly shopkeeper in Mayo asked him if he meant a ‘mineral’ (of course he did.)

Anyway, you know what happened next. Early in the current century, not only did Irish people start drinking water, but in a surprise coal-to-Newcastle move, people started making money from selling bottles of the stuff to Irish people whose kitchen taps were full of free and drinkable water. Initially, all bottled water was sparkling — we weren’t that stupid — but soon we were, and fortunes were made charging people in shops for stuff that was freely available in their homes. Then, a few years back, we started worrying about the amount of plastic we were consuming and refillable water bottles became a thing. Now, finally, you could drink the water from your taps but without being in your kitchen and it was indeed a brave new world.

Then, somehow, a memo must have gone out about drinking all the water. Because all of a sudden, almost overnight, water bottles have become absolutely enormous. We have never been thirstier. We were recording our podcast the other night and Barbara Scully’s water bottle was almost as big as she is, and B is tall. In college, The Youngest mistook a fellow student’s water bottle for a fire extinguisher. It’s no longer enough to drink half a litre of the stuff in a single sitting: now we are to glug gallons of it down like there’s no tomorrow. Additionally, these huge new water bottles come with a sort of in-built straw device because apparently we no longer trust our mouths.

Surely it’s obvious how this will end. By late summer, the land will be arid and dusty and the farmers livid in the face of a failed harvest. And for once, we won’t be able to blame the weather. Simply, the rain can’t keep up with our new, gigantic water bottles. We are in serious danger of drinking ourselves dry and not in the way we traditionally did. This pending disaster might have the fingerprints of the Spanish all over it, but ultimately, they only drink some of the water. It is we Irish who are drinking it all. Not for the first time in our history, we simply don’t know when to stop.