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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
44 July-August 2024
Environmental
dreams, and
databases
Malcolm James Coxall showed the Power of One, politically
– particularly in the case of THM water contamination
By Tony Lowes
Mlcolm’s Connemr Cottge ©JohnHinde
ENVIRONMENT
July-August 2024 45
Malcolm did Trojan work in re-configuring
the data to reveal a staggering picture
– a thousand individual drinking water
supplies showing persistent breaches of
microbiological standards
Mlcolm Coxll, 2012
water: “there’s things living in it – boil it for
7 minutes”, they were told. They crashed a
Local Water Committee (later ‘Group Water
Scheme’) meeting in protest, subsequently
joining forces with an enlightened local
priest – Father Joe Gibbons – who secretly
had the water tested and found to be unfit
for human consumption.
The cause was overgrazing by sheep
which exposed the soil to run-o into the
drinking water source. Local lobbying
proved fruitless: the Ballycroy Water
Committee said that it would be better not
to inform the people because “it would only
upset them”.
Malcolm turned to the European
Commission’s complaint procedure,
creating a prototype of his dream to do it –
a programme he christened EcoBASE. It
allowed him to enter the raw drinking-water
data and analyse it to find the consumers
who were being supplied with water that
exceeded the parameters for biological
contamination – principally faecal e-coli.
Ireland was fortunate that the ocial
responsible for first gathering the data was
very conscientious in ensuring that the
reporting was both accurate and very
extensive – only one of three EU Member
States to do so.
While E. coli itself may not be the most
harmful organism, its presence indicates
recent faecal contamination which means
there could be other dangerous pathogens.
These pathogens can cause various
waterborne diseases including diarrhoea,
vomiting, cramps, and fever. In severe
cases, they can lead to complications like
kidney failure or even death, especially for
vulnerable populations like young children
and the elderly. A 1996 outbreak in Scotland
caused the death of 21 people.
Working with Friends of the Irish
Environment [FIE], Malcolm prepared a
detailed complaint to the European
Commission in 1998. This eventually led to
a judgment against Ireland in 2002 that
said:
“by failing to ensure compliance with
microbiological parameters total and
faecal coliforms identified in ocial
drinking water reports and in
correspondence concerning Ballycroy
(Ireland), Ireland has failed in by
failing, in its implementing legislation,
to reflect the binding character of the
requirements” [Case C-316/00].
As the judgment put it, “In respect of
water quality the Directive does not
establish a mere duty of diligence but an
obligation to achieve a certain result”.
A senior Commission ocial said that: “I
doubt that the case would have been
possible at all without Malcolm’s
stupendous work. Section 40 of that
judgment detailing the exceedances was
entirely due to Malcolm’s systematic
reconstruction of the presentation of the
data.
Malcolm did Trojan work in re-configuring
the data to reveal a quite staggering picture
– a thousand or so individual drinking water
supplies showing persistent breaches of
microbiological standards. Malcolm’s work
made the data supply-focused, and that
became the evidential backbone of the
Commission’s case. The complainant had a
remarkable sense of public spirit”.
Attacking the symptoms
not the cause
While biological contamination can be
eliminated with chlorine, when chlorine
reacts with organic matter – peaty soil,
fallen branches or debris – it produces many
chemicals that form the harmful disinfectant
by-product trihalomethanes [THMs].
The Commission warned Ireland that it
was particularly vulnerable, as with 80% of
its drinking water drawn from exposed
surface sources, alternative methods to
chlorine needed to be considered. Chlorine
also does not protect against the parasite
cryptosporidium, 400% more prevalent in
Ireland than the European average at the
time, and the scourge of Galway in 2007.
The Environmental Protection Agency
and the Health and Safety Executive in 2013
W
hen Malcolm Coxall was 14,
he told his parents he was
going to Ireland for the
summer, setting o on his
own to travel the byways and
highways. He had saved money for the ferry
and stayed in youth hostels, returning each
summer, falling in love with a thatched
cottage by the seaside, west of Clifden in
Connemara. With the help of the local
solicitor — because he was underage, at 17
— he bought it and went on to restore it, and
several others.
Malcolm’s final years at school in Hull, in
the words of his friend and later editor Guy
Caswell “were a riot, cruising around East
Yorkshire in a friend’s Austin dressed as
hippies. Mal would wear a cape, blow on a
penny flute whilst reciting Gregorian chants!
If we passed a church, he would insist we
stop, creep into the church and start up the
organ! ‘Man is nothing!’ he would rail.
‘Nature rules, man can’t tame nature!’ He
was ‘charismatic, bursting with life and
ideas, questioning everything”.
Son of a corner-shop owner, he decided
not to go the University route yet by 1981 he
was designing computer systems for a wide
range of Irish companies ultimately
including the IDA, Pfizer, Guinness and
Avonmore.
He worked at the World Bank and, for
more than five years, at NATO, as Oracle
technical consultant responsible for
maintaining the database design and
development of the Logistics and
Procurement System for use in NATO’s
airborne weapon’s systems.
His dream was to equip the environmental
movement with computing power that could
take on the global corporations. Conny, his
wife for 34 years, said he had “a strong
sense of justice combined with an enormous
tenacity and a generous portion of
intelligence and before you know where you
are you have another court case on your
hands”.
“There’s things living in it”
The court case that was to change Irish
drinking water was triggered when he and
Conny returned from a stint in Bahrain and
found that the cottage they had bought in
Ballycroy, County Mayo, had undrinkable
46 July-August 2024
remained adamant: “The real risk of
inadequate chlorination, which can occur as
a reaction to breaches of the parametric
value, outweighs the risk associated with
THMs and should be avoided”. Ireland
attacked the symptoms of the problem
rather than the cause — an absence of
eective source protection and land-use
management.
Under Malcolm’s supervision FIE
volunteers added to EcoBASE the results of
the original chemical sampling. It
contradicted the EPA’s claim in the 2011
‘The Quality of Drinking Water in Ireland’
survey that “99.2% of the drinking water
complied with the chemical standards”. It
was skewed as it had been based on
frequent samples from urban supplies with
no THMs, with only rare testing of rural
supplies. In reality 598,951 people were
actually consuming drinking water that was
a potential danger to human health – with
one supply nine times the limit. No public
notification of these failures had ever taken
place – aside from the obscure online
publication of a ‘Remedial Action List’ [RAL]
- in spite of a 2007 Statutory Instrument
that says that if a water supply is placed on
the RAL the public must be notified. Village
devoted three pages to the story in October
of 2011 — to no avail.
12 years later
While Malcolm’s original complaint on
biological contamination took four years
before judgment, it was not until January 26
of this year – twelve years later and four
years after his death – that the Court ruled
against Ireland and upheld the THM
complaint [C-481/22], declaring that Ireland
had failed in its duty to provide clean
drinking water – and in its subsequent
failure to inform the public that even a
simple charcoal filter would protect them.
It was not until January
26 of this year – 12 years
later and 5 years after
his death – that the Court
ruled against Ireland and
upheld the THM complaint,
declaring that Ireland had
failed in its duty to provide
clean drinking water
Mlcolm Coxll’s EU complint spwned the THM cmpign
We know now that THM-heavy water results
in a 15% increase in the likelihood of
bladder cancer.
Malcolm and Conny left Ireland in 2013,
disillusioned by people’s inaction, worried
about potential threats and fed up with ‘it’s
a great country and we’re lovely people’ -
and the rain. They bought a remote farm in
a nature reserve north of Málaga.
Malcolm set up computer programmes for
the Spanish organic movement. He
published several books: ‘Human
Manipulation: A Handbook’, ‘Machiavellian
Management’ and ‘Civil Disobedience’.
EcoBASE’s ‘Integrated Physical and
Logical System Design’ has not been
completed. It was to be a cloud software
available for use by independent
environmental consultancies and NGOs,
simply displaying: ground and surface
water test data; drinking and wastewater
data; air quality data; land-use, planning,
and extractive industry data; historical
meteorological data and inshore fisheries
records. It was to incorporate a built and
archaeological database, a mapping data
interface to ArcGIS, an energy use database,
and a user-definable biodiversity database.
EcoBASE was designed for use in
assessing planning applications, new
developments, EU requirements for
Environment Impact Assessments and other
non-standard environment impact
evaluations.
Malcolm Coxall showed us how to be
good, and in particular showed
environmentalists how to eectively mix
idealism and practicality. He died five years
ago but he was a lifetime ahead of his time.
One day, Malcolm.
Tony Lowes is a director of FIE
