I meant to say something about RTE’s Future Shock episode last week where Philip Boucher-Hayes talked about the looming water crisis. It was really quite interesting for the first half: how are we going to deal with the water shortage facing Dublin? Options are few. Dublin, for all sorts of technical reasons, doesn’t lend itself to further local collection. The experts say the only option is to divert water from the River Shannon. Future Shock suggested that, if such a plan were to go ahead, water would most likely be drawn from Lough Ree and piped to collection points further east. Opposition to this proposal would be extremely strong (as one participant in the programme indicated: water would be drawn from Ree ‘over his dead body’), but nothing like as strong as if the point of diversion were to be located further south near Lough Derg.

Yet, some of your emails from last week suggest that this is actually what's going to happen: the powers-that-be have already shifted from the Ree proposal and are briefing folks about a plan to draw water from Portumna (north end of Lough Derg) instead. Is this so? Anybody got anything solid?