Michael Harding: Water is so potent even St Patrick didn’t mess with it

In Leitrim the rain drifts in from the Atlantic and falls on to my roof. It runs in rivulets to the guttering beneath the eaves, until it finds a downward pipe through which it falls into a huge cement water tank behind the house. By this means I am blessed with water all year round.

I like the idea of endless water coming from the sky. To paraphrase the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, water becomes a cloud and then a shower. It falls to the earth and unites with the river. In winter it becomes ice, but melts again in summer and rises up to form another cloud. So nothing is ever lost, but everything is always changing.

Water is the universal sign and symbol of life in the cosmos. In raw scientific terms, water may be the very source of life.

I first realised the importance of water when I accompanied my granny to Knock in the back of an Austin A7. Her hat got squashed against the roof as we went over a humpbacked bridge somewhere in Roscommon. She was terrified, but she was prepared to endure terror just to get her hands on a few bottles of holy water from a tap near the shrine, and to pray at the gable wall where God’s mother once appeared on a wet rainy night long ago.

Blessings with holy water

Granny used her bottles of holy water to bless her grandchildren going out the door, and her husband coming home, and the Christmas goose going into the oven, and her son’s coffin going to the cemetery, and the blackened Stanley range before she lit the twigs. Even sick pigs got an occasional skite, and she sprinkled water on every linoleum floor in the house on St Brigid’s Day. She left jugs of it on the table on All Souls’ Eve, so that when the wounded in the other world came visiting they would be comforted by water.

So it wasn’t difficult for me as a child to figure out that water was a powerful symbol of hope in the face of anxiety, hunger, illness and even death. Holy water stretched beyond the threshold of the visible world, into the shadows where we were all heading.

Every county in Ireland is peppered with holy wells, dark pools rising from the rocks below, shaded sanctuaries where spiders thrive, sheltered by old stone walls that keep the wind at bay; and sometimes bushes of rag and bandage or holy medals stand nearby, proclaiming blessings and cures received at the well of spring water.

In ecological terms, Ireland is a plentiful mother who nurtures humans as well as wild animals and every form of vegetation. The mountains and valleys are full of her name, and water is her elixir, its nourishment oozing out from bogs and swamps and mountain streams. The white goddess is a hidden presence everywhere: in lakes, offshore islands and in the May bushes that flourish from Antrim to Kerry, where the curved hills are known as the Breasts of Anu.

Songs of the monks

Even when the first Christians set foot on Erin with their newfangled images of a masculine god, it was water that their monks sang about. They chanted their praise of a god who comes like “living water to a dry, weary land”.

But I suppose some people think there is no faith left in Ireland. They think that because people revolted in righteous anger against the clergy, there is nothing sacred any more. But they might be wrong.

Corrib Gas will soon be shooting flames into the sky above Belmullet as it bleeds the sea bed off Mayo for fuel. And soon Fermanagh’s lakes, home of the goddess Ceithlinn, may be fracked. And the Shannon pot, the source of wisdom in ancient days, may shudder in the Cuilcagh mountains as the monster drills burrow deep into the rocks. I suppose it’s no wonder that half of Leitrim is sick with worry about the future.

And now our masters want the water. It’s not just that they want money to service the reservoir system or upgrade the pipes. That would be fine. But they want the water itself, drop by drop. They probably think that modern Ireland is finished with prayers and piseogs, and the mumbled devotions of old women.

Certainly my granny was superstitious, although I would never underestimate her wisdom. And she would certainly have thought them mad to claim possession of a substance so potent in its symbolism that even St Patrick did not mess with holy wells, for fear of incurring the wrath of ancient gods.