Political ecologies of infrastructural and intestinal decay

Abstract

In March 2007, when Cryptosporidium contaminated water supplies in Galway City, Ireland, political authorities responded quickly to upgrade water treatments plants. This response framed the crisis as a solely technical problem of infrastructural decay, obscuring legacies of urban and agricultural (over)development. In this paper, we examine dominant responses to infrastructural contamination that depoliticize and re-inscribe divisions among bodies, nature, infrastructure, rural and urban. The temporality of the Galway outbreak and the speedy response by the state is not replicated throughout Ireland. In parts of rural Roscommon, the neighbouring county to Galway, microbiological risks to the drinking water supply have been left unattended for more than eight years. The interplay of social, political, economic, and ecological factors produces uneven exposures to health risks that are situated within and mediated through water infrastructure. Drawing on postcolonial insights, the unevenness of infrastructural provision across Ireland does not just tell a story of exclusion and othering, but also provides space for different infrastructural projects to unfold. While the response to contamination within the public water supply replayed well-known technical fixes, the work of the National Federation of Group Water Schemes, the representative body of community managed water systems in rural Ireland, illustrates a different form of infrastructural practice that negotiates legacies of institutional abandonment and acknowledges the wider hydro-social cycle as part of, rather than ancillary to, water infrastructure. By blending political ecologies of health and postcolonial approaches to infrastructure, we analyse the unevenness of responses to infrastructural contamination and trace its relationship to legacies of uneven development and imaginaries of urban and rural Ireland.

Drinking Water Source Protection for Surface Water Abstractions: An Overview of the Group Water Scheme Sector in the Republic of Ireland

“…The GWS sector is ideally placed to lead such community action in the Republic of Ireland through drinking water source protection measures in collaboration with relevant agencies and community groups. The fact that GWS have over many years built up a high level of trust within the sector should avoid top-down approaches and ensure that local expertise is engaged in the processes of creating and applying solutions [34].…”

“…While a large body of work remains to be undertaken, the progress made in drinking water source protection over the past 15 years in the Republic of Ireland provides a solid foundation for implementing a community-led catchment-based approach to improving drinking water quality at the national scale and addressing legacies of historical under-investment in drinking water infrastructure nationally [34].…”

A spatial justice perspective on EU rural sustainability as territorial cohesion

“…Conventionally, rural development has been framed in economic terms, informed by an enduring spatial imaginary in which lagging rural regions are presented as needing to catch up with dynamic urban economies (Bresnihan & Hesse, 2020). Here, sustainable development is often presented as a matter of economic success or failure, with success linked to urban progress and modernity versus rural decline and backwardness (ibid.).…”

New extractive frontiers in Ireland and the moebius strip of wind/data

“…As has been documented by environmental justice scholars, the offshoring of such polluting Despite surges of public protests against industrial development in Ireland's rural peripheries throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the state acted to suppress environmentalist discourses and awareness of pollution and resource consumption corresponding to the importation of toxic industries, thus creating a durable amnesia surrounding hydro-ecological crises in Ireland, whether pesticide pollution in agri-business, or dioxin contamination by pharmaceutical plants. (2016: 13) This pattern continues to the present, with major water, waste and energy infrastructures planned across the country that serve to enrol largely rural areas into the urban, and global, metabolic flows of contemporary production in highly uneven forms (Bresnihan and Hesse, 2020).…”