IT’S easy to forget the complex system by which water ends up coming out of our taps. 

Towards the end of Ulysses by James Joyce, Stephen Daedalus and Leopold Bloom have just finished a lengthy drinking session, and have returned to Bloom’s house.
 
Bloom fills an iron kettle with water from the tap in order to prepare cocoa. Joyce describes in exacting detail the causal chain that delivers water into Bloom’s kettle: all the way from the 2,400 million gallons of “Roundwood reservoir,” through a “subterranean aqueduct of filter mains” constructed at a cost of “£5 per linear yard” and eventually through a system of “relieving tanks” down into Dublin.
 
By including this lengthy description — over 200 words long — Joyce emphasises the communality of even the intimate, personal act of filling a kettle. 

Society contains millions of superficially isolated personal decisions: a late-night cup of cocoa. But Joyce knew that by including the wider perspective, he could demonstrate that these small acts in fact rested on vast networks of co-operative endeavours. 

The inclusion of these observations about what it is to live in modernity, depending on behind-the-scenes systems that one is entirely ignorant of, is part of what makes Ulysses still resonate with readers a century later.  
 
Ulysses is set in June 1904. As Bloom fills his kettle, Joyce mentions that the reservoir level is lower than it should be due to a “prolonged” summer drought — so much so that the borough surveyor and waterworks engineer has “prohibited the use of municipal water for purposes other than those of consumption.” At this time, water in both Ireland and England was controlled by local authorities. It was seen as a municipal service.  

This is no longer the case in either country. In England and Wales, privatisation under the Thatcher-led Conservative government saw local water authorities converted into private companies. 

Ten regional water authorities were sold off in 1989. They lost the word “Authority” from their names, but more importantly they changed from being services run for the public good to being companies run for profit.

One of the supposed motivations behind this privatisation was to shift the responsibility for the bill to upgrade water infrastructure away from the public purse. 

In the 1980s, a majority of the public in Britain were not in favour of water privatisation. Yet the Conservative government still decided to go ahead with it — although they knew the issue was so toxic they decided not to campaign on it going into a general election. 

When they won, they did it anyway. Since 1989, according to academics at the University of Greenwich, water bills have increased at 40 per cent above the rate of inflation.

Returning to Ireland, the situation is different again. Local authorities remained in control of water until 2015, when a state-owned public utility was created, Irish Water, which led to a complex situation of water charges, huge protests and fears about full-scale privatisation. 

The utility is currently owned by the semi-state body Ervia which delivers both gas and water infrastructure. However, last month plans were announced to separate it off into a new standalone utility, Uisce Eireann, in 2023.

The current crisis over water companies in England is a perfect example of the perils of privatisation. Even for proponents of the free market, the situation is ideologically bankrupt: “consumers” have no choice about their water supplier, and so the reality is a privatised monopoly of what should be a basic state service.

As the Guardian noted in 2021, even within the UK this privatised monopoly is an English problem. 

Welsh Water has been not-for-profit since 2001. Scottish Water is a statutory corporation owned entirely by the Scottish government. Northern Ireland Water was not privatised in 1989, and has been a government-owned company since 2007.

When a menu of alternative options is available within the same country, that reveals how unradical renationalisation actually is — and even the different ways it could work. 

The peculiar English system makes little sense and needs urgent reform.

Part of dealing with vast problems such as climate change and the new weather patterns it brings is making public decisions about the future. 

After weeks without rain, floods are expected across Britain this week as rain falls on hard dry ground. 

Flooding means destruction of homes and businesses as sewage is washed out of unprepared water treatment plants into towns. 

Choosing to invest more money now based on strong scientific backing, in order to save money in the long-term, is a choice that we should be making.

Even if one believed that companies were capable in principle of doing this, evidence from the recent drought in England and the response of the water companies suggests that they are not. 

The symptoms are well-publicised: huge amounts lost in leaks that exacerbate droughts, illegal dumping of sewage outflow into our rivers, vast salaries and bonuses for chief executives, and profits for shareholders — many private equity firms — at a time of national crisis. 

Many people agree with this assessment. As the head of the Environment Agency said recently: “The water companies are behaving like this for a simple reason: because they can.” 

It is therefore baffling that Labour last month dropped plans to bring water back into public ownership (along with rail and energy).

It is true that nationalisation is not a panacea. It does not magically improve services by itself. It is simply not possible to avoid large costs in upgrading large-scale infrastructure, particularly after historic underinvestment. 

But at least if this infrastructure is publicly owned and operated, as in the case of water renationalisation, we — and the “we” is important — can focus on delivering a public service for everyone rather than ensuring that shareholders profit. 

One measure of a good society is the public provision of the necessities of life. As Joyce wrote in Ulysses, water is “neverchanging everchanging.” 

It is a constant of our lives that must keep circulating. Joyce’s near-religious fervour over the small miracle of water coming out of a tap is justified. 

Climate change will make these questions about long-term investment and transformation of public services only more acute over the coming years — starting the process in earnest should be an urgent priority.