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#WaterHeritageDay encapsulates our mission – to celebrate water in all its forms and our relationship with it.

Enjoy this beautiful book of stories compiled by the Local Authorities Water Programme

Enjoy the beautiful artwork by children from around the world for the competition #TheWaterWeWant

http://thewaterwewant.watermuseums.net/

As we celebrate #DayoftheSeafarer we hope that all are safe at sea.

Life at sea has been the inspiration for many artists, musicians, poets ….

This dramatic painting is Kingstown by Richard Brydges Beechey. Kingstown, now known as Dún Laoghaire, is home to the beautiful National Maritime Museum @NMMIreland which re-opens on 10th July https://mariner.ie

As we face the challenges of climate change, migration and sustainable livelihoods, we hope the oceans remain clement and clean to support sea-life as well as those whose lives depend on them. We hope that those who travel the seas will always be safe.

Bloomsday celebrates the novel of James Joyce, Ulysess, which takes place over one day, the 16th of June 1904, and the central character Leopold Bloom. Among the many musings and meanderings of Bloom, he contemplates water as he fills the kettle, and how it flows from reservoir to tap, weaving its way from Wicklow through aqueducts, tanks and pipes to Dublin City, and the fascinating engineering of municipal waterworks, rationing and convictions for wastage. He proceeds to dwell on the multitude qualities of water itself.

Extract from Ulysses by James Joyce (1922):

What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire?

Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator’s projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval ba¬sin: its luteofulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of pen¬insulas and islands, its persistent formation of homothetic islands, peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its grada¬tion of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their trib¬utaries and transoceanic currents, gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, water¬spouts, Artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdo¬mantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the well by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gul¬lies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorpho¬ses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, tur-bines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navi¬gable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photo¬phobe), numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90 percent of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.

See more about James Joyce, Ulysess & Bloomsday:

MoLI – Museum of Literature Ireland, Dublin

The James Joyce Centre, Dublin

Joyce’s Tower, Sandycove, Dublin

Bloomsday Festival

One of the many intriguing qualities of water is how is connects us globally. We are all dependent on it and we all share it. We share it physically as it moves around the globe providing the essence of life, our life and our quality of life. We also share it emotionally in our relationships with it, in our rituals, our music, our literature, in all the arts, for our livelihoods and for our sense of well-being.

At this time of the Covid-19 pandemic we are reminded more than ever how connected and co-dependent we are: how an illness can spread so easily among us and how we can co-operate to slow it down and to find a vaccine or cure, how we comfort each other in isolation, how we grieve for those we did not know, for their families and communities, and also how we find ways share our joys, our music and our dreams.

The Sustainable Development Goals strive to harness this potential to cooperate globally and work together to eliminate poverty and suffering and to build better lives for everyone. They give us hope that humanity will solve its problems. There is no need to leave anyone behind.

World Water Day is about deepening our understanding of water and its role in our lives. WWD 2020 focuses on water and climate change. Water connects us in many ways not least because it is vital. The United Nations World Water Development Report 2020 is now available.

The Connections page will be updated with links that connect us. Links to water & non-water related information and activities, links to other museums, institutions and pages providing inspiration, sharing ideas and bringing us joy – bringing us together, like water.

Just as water connects us all, the current situation as CoVid-19 sweeps across the globe shows us just how closely we are all interconnected and co-dependent.

The Global Water Museums Network exemplifies this. The City of Wuhan has hosted major international water conferences in 2018 and 2019 and was due to host the 3rd Great Rivers Forum this year. The Network’s 4th annual conference this year was due to be held in Hangzhou, China. Our head office is in Venice, Italy.

We wish to send our support to our colleagues in China and Italy and to all those dealing with the current outbreak worldwide. We are connected, we stand together.

This beautiful poster was created by our Italian colleagues in support of our colleagues in Wuhan and China. We support you all. Stay strong.