Ireland's got what India has not

I hope you'll read our Travel story today. It's by my Spotlight colleague Birgit Roberts, who went to India with her husband, Richard, and returned with some dramatic photos of the people and the country's paradoxes.

India has it all: Bollywood, naan bread, the Kama Sutra, tigers, the Himalayas, nuclear weapons, the Taj Mahal, elephants... The list goes on and on. Ireland, sadly, does not have any of these, but it has something valuable that India needs badly and which you can see in this photo that I took near where I was born. Do you know what it is?

The answer is water. Parts of India are experiencing severe water shortages. NASA's Grace mission has discovered that in India's north-west — including Delhi — the water table is falling by 4 cm a year. The human cost of this crisis is shown in Birgit's first, unforgettable photo.

So, yes, it's been a bit of a wet summer and endless sunshine is wonderful, but, believe me, there's a reason why we call whiskey uische beatha where I come from. It's the water of life, because there's no whiskey without water and there's no life without water. Drink up!