It's the best drink of all, every one of us knows it. It's the fashion, these days, for young people to walk around the streets of Dublin, and presumably elsewhere, eating and drinking as they go. The liquid is mostly water, sometimes orange or a concoction of the kind, but basically water, including foreign bottled varieties.
Now, you may be one of the people who say that no water has ever tasted as good as the water you pumped up from the depths of Johnny McGowan's well back in your rural retreat and hauled up to the cool pantry in two white enamel buckets. Indeed, you may be right, but in those youthful days you didn't realise what a privilege you had there in old-style farming. No sprays.
And we tend to think that most people in this state are on some local water scheme. One man who had to have his own well bored is grateful for the supply but, in spite of regular testing by an expert, will not give his tap water to children to drink. And he extends that to take in even water boiled for tea and keeps a store of two-litre bottles of Irish spring water. Now, admittedly, this is taking things to the ultimate limit. But if you live on a slope, and you don't know all the underground streams and trickles that make up your supply, and you are not sure of your neighbours' policy on weedkillers and other modern aids to agriculture, you feel more easy.
In Ireland there was a time when, as in continental countries, we were big on spas, spa waters to drink and to frolic in. Just looking at a pamphlet from the French Government Tourist Office in Dublin on the town of Evian on Lac Leman it was noted that it was described as the birthplace of natural mineral water known throughout the world. The town itself has only 7,000 inhabitants.
Its discovery of the mineral water was made in 1790, and the first company operating to sell it, and a thermal spa, came in 1826. They have tours of the town and its water benefits (including a musical fountain) and lots of fun with baths, jets, aqua-relaxation and all that. Then, of course, you've Badoit, Vittel, Perrier, Vichy. We have several, not so well known or advertised waters. But you hope that will come. Dammit, we should drink our own stuff.