Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink

This is one I've done in the past few days. I'm really interested in this section of North West Kildare, not least because as an avid cyclist, it's about the only place in the county where there are some decent hills. Also, the roads are quiet. But, under the ground, it's anything but quiet - in fact it's a fascinating place. Pity the County Council and the Department of Environment haven't realised that.

As you'll see from the article, the locals are forced to use their own wells, with less than satisfactory results.

Rust damage from excess iron in the water.

More damage, this time to the inside of the cistern on the toilet of a house near Carbury.

One of the wells that was dug, but has since been capped. There's a trickle of water flowing from it, down to the ditch - hence the fresh green grass.

It will surprise most, given the general downturn in our national fortunes, to hear that a €154 million programme of investment was announced for Kildare in the past couple of weeks.
But the most surprising bit is that the investment, which was in various water service schemes, does not include anything for a proposed scheme that would provide a large section of the county with a public water service for the first time, a service locals have been fighting to secure for the past 20 years.
The furthest reaches of North West Kildare are one of the most remote parts of the county and is characterised by the rolling hills of the Esker Riada.
It's a place of large farms and small quarries, where 10 minutes driving in either direction could leave you in either Kildare, Offaly or Meath. Another ten minutes and you're in Westmeath.
Above the ground it's fairly quiet – a passing tractor or a far off dog barking being the only thing you'll encounter most of the time.
But under the ground is another story, with an abundance of underground lakes and streams. According to Seamus Langan, a local county councillor living in the area, there are several wells in the area that can produce up to a million gallons of water per hour.
On the one hand, this is great news because it could reduce the county’s dependence on water from the Liffey, which provides 90% of it. In an era where some are suggesting that water be piped across the country from the Shannon to Dublin, it's a pressing issue for a county with one of the biggest populations in the state.
On the other hand it adds a definite touch of the bizarre to this whole saga, because as it stands now, the population of a large area that stretches from Derrinturn to Johnstownbridge, from Clogherinkoe to Broadford, has no public water service.
Each house is dependent on its own, or a nearby well for water. Inevitably the quality of the water is mixed. While some households have no problems, as our pictures show, a high degree of iron in some wells has left some people with, in practical terms, no water.
But here's where it gets more complicated. Two decades ago, in 1990, the Balyna Group Water Scheme was established - the aim being to provide usable water to local people.
The Scheme's organising committee collected more than €219,000 from more at least 700 homes. The cost per household was reckoned to be approximately €800, and most households gave at least half.
Twenty years later, there's still no scheme. “We can't go back looking for the rest,” Frank Caffrey of the group told the Leinster Leader. “There's a certain loss of credibility.
“People are asking where the scheme is. And some are even asking for their money back,” he said.
In 2004 it was decided by the Water Services Section of Kildare County Council that because of the size of the proposed scheme and the infrastructure required, it should be included in their Water Service Investment Programme in order to put the supply of water on a more sound footing.
The scheme received approval and work started with wells being dug in a number of spots around the area.
The County Council even went so far as to publish more than 30 Compulsory Purchase Orders in this newspaper in 2005. And, the Leinster Leader understands, those plots of land have been bought and paid for.
But since then, the whole thing has come to a halt. Wells have now been capped and no further work has taken place in recent times.
Kildare County Council is on record as saying that it was proposed to abstract approximately eight million litres a day from groundwater under wellfields at Roberstown and Johnstownbridge
It was thought that a new €1.2 billion worth of investment in national water services might kick start the whole thing again. And the scheme was included in a needs assessment that had been submitted to the Department of Environment, Heritage and Local Government.
Minister John Gormley told Bernard Durkan in the Dail in March this year that the application was being considered. He added that his Department was waiting for documents from Kildare County Council, and that once they got these, “a decision will be notified to the Council as soon as possible in light of the finalisation of the Water Services Investment Programme for 2010-2012.”
However, on Tuesday, April 20, again in response to Deputy Durkan, he said it was “not possible to include the Ballyna Regional Water Supply Scheme amongst the priority contracts and schemes selected for inclusion”.
So, somehow the Ballyna Regional Water Supply Scheme, which locals have campaigned for 20 years and was to provide a basic water service to people who essentially, currently have none, fell down the list of priorities.
This left a lot of people in North West Kildare scratching their heads, and understandably, very angry.
At the May meeting of County Councillors from the Clane Area Committee, the Council confirmed the bad news and told Cllr. Seamus Langan, that the Council's “Water Services has since met with the Department Inspector to impress on him the importance and need for the Scheme and the desirability of progressing the Scheme through the Planning Stage.
“The Department requested that Water Services resolve all outstanding issues with Waterways Ireland in relation to the Grand Canal.”
And with a review of the Programme due at the end of the year, “there may be a possibility of further considering the position of the wellfields in this context, but only if the Waterways issue is resolved in the interim.”
An internal memo between engineers within the Water Services Section sent May 22, 2009 and seen by the Leinster Leader stated that “progress has been delayed due to the introduction of new forms of contract and their imposition on Local Authorities in 2008.
“In addition, technical issues have been raised by Waterways Ireland in relation to water table drawdown from the wellfields in Robertstown.”
However in response to a query from the Leinster Leader, the County Council said issues with Waterways Ireland were not responsible for the non-inclusion of the Scheme in the investment programme.
But at the time of going to press, yesterday morning, Tuesday, May 25, the Council has yet to explain why the Scheme was not included.
However Deputy Bernard Durkan said that he believed the Scheme had fallen foul of the Department of the Environment's new priorities which are to support schemes that aim to conserve water rather than increase the amount being used.
“This worked out badly for the people of that area.Their situation is critical. They have no drinking water, or it's tainted and discoloured.
“It's totally and absolutely unfair that they should be treated in that fashion.”
As to who or what organisation or person was responsible for letting the people of North West Kildare fall through the cracks, he concluded, in spectacularly Kafka-esque fashion that: “The local authority had pre-ordained which way it would go, in accordance with the Minister's wishes”.
But he swore he wasn't finished on the matter. “As far as I'm concerned, I don't intend to let it rest.
“There's more to this story,” he said.
And the Leinster Leader will keep you up to date.

Tells its own story really.

I had fun writing this one. Production needed more wordage than normal for space reasons, so I obliged with a little rant on the question of SUV's. Hope it makes sense.


MAKE AND MODEL: Kia Sorrento

DESCRIPTION: jeep/SUV

ENGINE: 2.2 litre Diesel

OTHER AVAILABLE ENGINES: None, but it's also available in automatic and two wheel drive

FIRST IMPRESSIONS: The kind of refinement normally found in Europe.

THE LOW DOWN: It's time to talk about SUV's.
There was once a time when a tall vehicle with a large diesel engine, four wheel drive capability, space in the back for a few bales of hay and a general robustness about it was known as a jeep.
It didn't greatly matter whether it was a Land/Range Rover, a Toyota Landcrusier, an Isuzu Trooper or a Mitsubishi Pajero, it was still a jeep.
Of course, 'Jeep' can't be the official name for them because, since 1987, it is actually a brand name that belongs to Chrysler. In fact the very word explains their true heritage. Back in the second world war, the rugged open topped cars the American army used to get around were known as General Purpose vehicles. This became shortened to GP, or Jeep.
So let us, for the purpose of this history lesson, call them jeeps with a small 'j'.
By and large, the only people who bothered to buy jeeps were farmers, builders and the horsey people – in other words the kind of people who actually needed one, and it was a sensible and responsible option.
Anyway, the Americans, who were loading them up with surf boards and mountain bikes or pulling horseboxes started to call them Sports Utility Vehicles. And if they'd left it there, that would have been fine.
But then some jackass decided that, well seeing as some shallow urbanised Americans were buying them to make themselves look cool and rugged, but weren't actually putting surf boards in them, or ever going off road, that maybe we should go the whole hog and make them comfortable passenger cars.
And little by little, engine sizes became smaller, the seats got more padding, four wheel drive became optional or dispensed with, and the difference between an SUV and one of those God-awful people carriers became purely cosmetic.
The result? A lot of the criticism of what are now called SUV's is hopelessly misguided.
Consider a seven-seat 2-litre diesel-powered, two-wheel drive thing that looks like what we used to call a jeep and is called an SUV. Now consider a seven-seat 2-litre diesel-powered, two-wheel drive thing that looks like a beached whale and is called a people carrier.
What's the difference? One is the sensible option for people with big families – the other has single-handedly caused global warming.
Where the marketing people have gotten it terribly wrong is that they messed up form and function.
If it comes in the form of a jeep, its function is to pull bullocks out of a mucky field and to the mart.
If it comes in the form of a beached whale, its function is to pull children out of bed and to school, soccer, ballet and back home again.
The Kia Sorrento we drove at Dunleas in Kilcullen last Thursday morning is a perfect example of all that.
It looks like a jeep. It is in fact an extremely good-value comfortable people carrier.
This is the second edition of the Sorrento. The first one was very popular because it was good looking and good value. The second one is better looking again and even better value.
Driving it was a revelation – possibly because I had low expectations. Kia have managed to somehow give the driver the impression they are driving a car. Features are close at hand, comprehensive and yet easy to operate.
On the narrow roads around Two-Mile-House and Athgarvan it certainly didn't feel like you were driving a tank. The sway that you normally associate with tall vehicles wasn't as pronounced as I've experienced it – and it was also remarkably quiet – no louder than a car with a similar engine.
And yet every so often when I turned around I'd get a bit of a shock to see how far back it goes.
You would think that a 2.2 litre diesel engine would be on the small side for a machine that big, but it has plenty of poke and the six speed manual gear box the Leinster Leader drove is eminently forgettable – not in the sense that it's bad, but in the sense that it is smooth and refined and not likely to get in the way of enjoying the drive.
Machines that size often come with gear boxes that resemble that of a 40 year old tractor.
The inside of the car goes against the worst instincts of Asian and American cars – that is to say they've avoided trying to make it cheap looking. There's a definite mid-range European sensibility going on here – kinda like a Renault or Opel.
There are leather seats complete with uncomplicated electric position adjusters.
Dunleas are pitching this as a good-value competitor to the over priced Audi Q7 or Discovery – and they're dead right to do so. But they could also comfortably pitch it at large families (numbers and/or size).
We found it difficult to find information on fuel economy. Our usual source only had info on the previous edition of the Sorrento. The larger 2.5 litre diesel in that model needed 10 litres of diesel per 100 kms in the city, 5.9 litres on the open road and an overall average of 6.7. Assuming the 2.2 litre is more frugal, then that's something to smile about. Although bear in mind that the automatic won't be as good.
Unfortunately, on the emissions side, they missed out by one single gram of CO2 and it is in Band E which will make it a little hefty on the pocket.
If a comfortable seven seater for a large family is what you're after, then to hell with the begrudgers, get yourself one of these.

PRICES RANGE FROM: €39,595 to €47,595.

WHO IS IT FOR: Large families.

MARKS OUT OF TEN: 8/10 Paying that tax will hurt!

Orla Tinsley

One of the good things about this job is that every so often you get a chance to meet some extraordinary people. This young lady is definitely one of them. This is a profile piece I did on Orla way back in September 2008.




After I interviewed Orla Tinsley for this piece, we found ourselves at another event, and, as the Bebo generation tend to put it, we ‘hung out’.
It was great fun. She’s great ‘hanging out’ material. She’s easygoing and full of chat, instantly putting everyone around her at ease.
Some people recognised her from her recent television appearance when she was presented with a Rehab People of the Year award for single-handedly branding the disgrace that passes for services for cystic fibrosis in this country onto the national consciousness.
Anyone who approached her was greeted with an easy smile and a feeling that only some people like Bill Clinton and the last Pope can convey, that for a moment, you are the only thing in the entire universe that matters to them.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s go back to the start, in 1987, when she was born. She grew up in what she cheekily calls ‘Kavanagh Mountains’ - an area of Hawkfield, near Newbridge, where members of the local Kavanagh family (including her mother) have built houses along a slight rise in the road. There, surrounded by her extended family she grew up and attended Scoil Mhuire National School and the Holy Family before starting in UCD three years ago, where she’s studying English and Ancient Greek and Roman Civilisation.
She’s in her third year there, and loves it. She especially loves English and dreams of becoming a writer when she graduates.
So far, so normal. Except that it’s not.
Three days after her birth she was diagnosed as having Cystic Fibrosis. CF is a hereditary disease affecting the mucous producing glands of the lungs, liver, pancreas, and intestines.
She became aware of the reality of the disease when she was about five or six and a girl whom she was friendly with in Temple Street Hospital, died.
“And I thought, oh God. I remember recognising something. It brought it home to you.”
Young Tinsley is nothing if not forthright when she wants to be and she makes it clear that she hates pity, and that despite the nature of her illness, there is nothing sad or morose about her.
“I hate people thinking that if you experience death you’re going to be sad and have a sorrow about you.”
With her childhood punctuated by hospital trips (a common theme for those with CF who are more susceptible to infection than most) her education was often split between lessons in the Temple Street Hospital and her schools in Newbridge.
Some other normal childhood activities were not engaged in – like getting exercise.
“I’m glad you brought that up,” she says. “Up until about 10 years ago it was believed that people with CF shouldn’t be playing sport.
“It was also suggested that you should have a non-fat diet, but actually that’s detrimental. “While the pancreas can’t digest fat, we take enzymes to digest it. But the better your weight is, the stronger you are to fight infection that comes along.
“However, as you get older with CF you start to lose bone density - and a way to counteract that is with exercise.”
“Up until last January, I mentally couldn’t get my head around the idea of exercise - as is the case with a lot of students.”
But under the guidance of her physiotherapist she took up weight-lifting and running, with which she is now happily obsessed.
“When I started, I could run for one minute and now I can go for 30 minutes. I’m doing a 5k run in October.
“I love running; it’s totally created a new perspective on life for me. It clears my mind, not to mention my lungs. It feels so great that I can do it. Running has made me so much more aware of my own body and my digestive system and the utter absolute importance of being hydrated. You need to eat complex carbs, and not going to three lectures without eating isn’t a good idea.”
Generally speaking, eating is an issue for those with CF. One of the aspects of the condition is that the over-production of mucous interferes with the body’s ability to absorb nutrition and energy from food. As a result people with CF often have Michael Phelps-like appetites.
“I’m a chocolate fiend and a sucker – literally - for fizzy sweets.
“There’s a team of people who look after us, including a doctor, physio and a dietician. They can give you shakes with 700 calories in them.”
However, the importance of keeping weight on and eating enough is not an issue for Orla. “I never think of it, because I love food.”
Her situation is complicated because she has diabetes. “It’s tricky. I have to be careful, but generally I eat what I want, when I want.
“For instance, when I’m in hospital - and I’m not saying it’s all fun and games – but I order Chinese at night time. And I eat a load of Diet Coke and Pringles.
“People know not to bring me fruit!”
Once she turned 18 and therefore became an adult, Orla’s time in Temple Street came to an end, and when she required hospital treatment, it was to St. Vincent’s hospital she went.
“The thing about being in a children’s hospital, is that it’s geared towards the kids. There’s a playroom and distractions throughout the day. There are clowns and cartoons and famous people visit you, so it’s very interesting.
“When you move into an adult hospital there’s nobody entertaining you, so it’s a bit of a culture shock.”
But if that was her only complaint, it wouldn’t be so bad.
“You go from being the oldest person in the ward, to being in a room with five other people, the majority of whom are elderly, or you end up in a psychiatric ward.”
When people with CF go to hospital to recover from infection they need, obviously, to avoid any further infection. That means having their own en-suite room on a special ward with appropriately trained staff.
Up until August 2008 there were only two beds for 300 CF patients who attended St. Vincent’s. For 20 years it was the designated CF hospital, and there were plans to develop a unit, which came to nothing. Orla knows of a fellow patient who was asked, 10 years ago, to be in a photo-op to announce a new building that was never built.
In her late teens Orla found herself in wards with elderly or psychiatric patients. She has written about having to walk elderly women with dementia back to bed, of fellow patients crying and coughing all night, of not having simple things like pillows and of beginning to wonder if hospital was probably the worst place for her.
It was the Irish Times who took up her plight and gave her a platform from which to campaign for better services.
"The idea that someone is poor, fragile, incapable and not in control of his/her destiny terrifies me. Yet right here, in this shambles of a health system, the reality is that what we fight so hard not to become has become us, uncontrollably so.
“We deserve freedom from infection and from the poor, confused woman who you constantly have to guide back to her bed because there is nobody else there to do it.
“As I lie exhausted in bed and listen to the coughs around me, I think of all the people with cystic fibrosis in hospitals right now who fear for our lives. I think of how detached from the situation those in power must really be and I struggle to understand the utter stupidity of their inaction.”
Ah yes, inaction.
All of this would be, if not excusable, then perhaps vaguely understandable if CF was a minor problem in Ireland.
“We seem to have a more aggressive strain of it than anywhere else in the world. It’s something to do with the famine,” she explained.
“We have the highest incidence in the world and it’s the most commonly inherited condition in the country.”
Ireland also has the highest rate of CF carriers in the world. One in every 19 Irish people carries the gene.
In reality Ireland has every good reason to be world leaders in all things CF.
“But we’re not.”
There are two things to say about her writing. The first is that it ignited a national debate, a wake up call to a smug nation, Government and Minister for Health, and eventually action in the form of eight single en-suite beds in St. Vincent’s as an interim measure established last month.
If they go well, there could be six more added.
By 2010 there will be a fully equipped, fully and appropriately staffed unit, but with 20 beds.
“We need 32 beds,” Orla says. But she’s happy that they will be ringfenced – only available for people with CF.
The other thing was the Irish Times and their readers’ noticed was that the then 20 year old had an extraordinary talent with the pen.
Letters to the editor described her writing as ‘profound’and ‘eloquant’, and the newspaper, like all newspapers on the lookout for new talent, have retained her services and kept her busy.
She now writes for them about things that have nothing to do with CF, which is exactly where someone with talent and dreams of being a writer wants to be in their third year in college. Recently she had a piece responding to overblown media reports of general debauchery in college.
After college, she’s hoping to sustain her career in journalism and writing.
But for the time being, she’s living in Clonskeagh with a five month old cat called George and two friends. “He’s very clever. I think pets know instinctively when you’re not well.”
And she’s still an ordinary 21 year old who got a huge thrill when she met one of her heroes, Andrea Corr who presented her with her award on Saturday night, September 13.
“She’s absolutely lovely, gorgeous. We chatted several times that night.”
With a sponsored dress from Rococo, a boutique beside the Westbury Hotel she “felt like a princess!”
But the dress’s length proved a difficulty getting onto and off the stage.
“Going up, I was trying to hold my dress up, and all I was thinking was ‘Andrea Corr is on the stage, Oh God!’ I was so overwhelmed that she was there, but I felt pretty comfortable once I was up.
“We had to walk down the ramp together afterwards, and I said to her: ‘How are we meant to get down?’
“She said: ‘I’ll hold onto you and you hold onto me’.
“And we shimmied down the ramp!”