A Mayo View: Water quality's clean, trusted image has slipped

MORE of us are in the water than ever. It needs to be worth trusting.

Walk past any lake or stretch of coast in Mayo on a fine evening now and you'll find it busier than it's ever been - not just swimmers, but a growing crowd of cold-water dippers and, increasingly, portable saunas parked up alongside them.

What was once a hardy few in wetsuits at dawn has become a genuine social scene, and it's being driven largely by young people chasing the mental and physical lift that a cold dip and a hot sweat are supposed to bring.

Whatever one makes of the wellness trend behind it, the practical effect is the same: more people, more often, going into water that we can no longer take for granted.

That's the uncomfortable part. Writing in the Irish Times this week, former Green Party leader and minister Eamon Ryan set out how far Ireland's water quality has slipped from the clean, trusted image many of us grew up believing in.

He points out that the majority of the country's rivers have lost the pristine status they once held, and that a large share of rural households relying on private wells are dealing with water that regularly fails contamination testing - a problem he traces to heavier rainfall, run-off from intensive farming, and septic tanks that don't meet standards.

He argues, fairly, that government policy on the nitrates derogation and on rural housing is making the underlying problem worse rather than better.

Mayo has its own, more visible version of that story. Several beaches in the county have been placed under a 'do not swim' notice this summer, Mulranny has been regularly closed this summer, with Carrowmore Beach, Clare Island, Carrowniskey and Dugort also receiving notices from the local authority after water samples failed testing.

These notices are becoming a familiar feature of the Mayo summer rather than a rare emergency event.

Mayo is a maritime county with a plethora of bathing areas on our coast and inland, all the while more and more people want to be in the water.

A young crowd building a weekly ritual around a lake swim and a sauna session is a genuinely good thing for a rural county: it gets people outdoors, builds community around something other than a pub, and it's exactly the kind of local, low-cost social life rural Ireland needs more of, not less.

But that only works long-term if the water underneath it can be trusted.

The local authority and Uisce Éireann both have a job here beyond posting a notice and waiting for the next sample. Faster public alerts when a notice goes up - not just a sign at the gate or a social media post.

These notices matter more now that far more people are showing up specifically to swim, not just to walk the beach.

And the council should be pushing, alongside central government, for the upstream fixes Ryan calls for nationally: proper septic tank standards, real investment in rural wastewater infrastructure, and development concentrated in towns and villages rather than scattered further into the catchment of our lakes and coastline.

Mayo is becoming a county that swims, dips and sweats together in growing numbers. It deserves water that's worth the trip.