Uisce Éireann Brand Guidelines: Irish Water’s 2023 Rename as a Standalone National Utility

A national utility built from local services.

Uisce Éireann is Ireland’s national water utility, and for its first decade it was better known by its English name, Irish Water. English Wikipedia says the company was created by the Irish Government in 2013, established under the Water Services Act 2013 as a subsidiary of Bord Gáis, the state gas company. Before that, water and wastewater services in Ireland were provided by local authorities, with domestic use funded through central taxation and non-domestic use through local authority rates, according to the same article.

The new company took over that role in stages. Wikipedia says that from 2015 legislation made it responsible for water and wastewater services across the country, and that it effectively took on existing local authority staff, facilities, pipes and infrastructure; some work, such as meter installation and customer support, is handed to sub-contractors. Its parent changed around it. Bord Gáis Éireann became Ervia in June 2014, after its energy-supply division and the Bord Gáis name were sold to a consortium led by Centrica, English Wikipedia says; Ervia was itself dissolved in June 2024, when its functions passed to Gas Networks Ireland.

The company answers to two regulators: the Commission for Regulation of Utilities, the economic regulator for the water industry, and the Environmental Protection Agency, the environmental regulator, English Wikipedia says. Wikipedia lists its tasks as maintaining and repairing the public supply network, replacing old pipes, tackling leaks and planning supply for a growing population. Its own website calls it “Ireland’s national regulated water utility,” responsible for drinking water and for treating wastewater before it is returned to the environment.

A rename written into law, and into the logo.

The change of name came with a change of status. In July 2022 it was announced that Irish Water would be renamed as part of its split from Ervia, English Wikipedia says; the new name, Uisce Éireann, took effect on 31 December 2022, and from 1 January 2023 the company became a standalone national utility. Its corporate-governance page says the Water Services (Amendment) Act 2022 provided both for the separation from the Ervia group and for the change of name, with no change to its functions, and that a non-executive board was appointed from the same date, with one director nominated by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions.

The company is a designated activity company limited by shares. Its shareholders are two government ministers, the Minister for Public Expenditure, NDP Delivery and Reform and the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage, which makes it a state-owned entity, its website says.

The rename was also a design job. RTÉ reported in March 2023, from records released under Freedom of Information, that the utility had always been known in Irish as Uisce Éireann alongside its better-known English identity, but that after the 2022 Act it was to be known only by its Irish name. An information note quoted by RTÉ said the decision was “in accordance with the spirit of the Official Languages Acts 2003 and 2021.” Designers were told that the old logo “understated” the word Éireann, according to the same report.

The English name did not vanish. RTÉ reported that, given the low level of everyday Irish speaking and Ireland’s multicultural population, the company required Irish Water to be kept in a “secondary position,” and that it saw the English name as vital for public communication about the water network, partly because “uisce” is hard for non-Irish speakers to pronounce. Development work on the new brand identity and logo was carried out by the Richards Dee design agency, with a public information campaign through the Publicis advertising agency and OMD media planning, RTÉ reported. The note said the review was a chance to “re-set perception of the organisation,” and that the new identity should “elevate the energy and vibrancy” of the utility. Its website title still reads “Uisce Éireann (formerly Irish Water).”

Water utilities and their names.

Most of what the public sees of a water company is practical rather than promotional: the vans that turn up to fix a main, the signs on the gates of treatment works and pumping stations, the bill that arrives through the door, and the notices posted when roads are dug up. For a design reader, those everyday pieces carry the identity more often than any advertisement does, because they are seen by every household in a supply area.

A bill is a working document, setting out what is owed, how to pay and where to find help, and a customer campaign is usually a single request; for a design reader, both are worth studying as type, layout and tone. Group names matter too: Pennon, for example, lists South West Water, Bournemouth Water, Bristol Water and SES Water as separate businesses on its own website, so one owner can sit behind several regional brands.

Photography leans on the landscape the companies manage. Reservoirs, moorland catchments, rivers, coastlines and the buildings of treatment works appear again and again, and some sites double as visitor places: English Wikipedia notes public access to Southern Water’s Bewl Water and guided tours of the Victorian sewers of Brighton and Hove, and a charity, South West Lakes Trust, that manages inland water sites across Cornwall, Devon and West Somerset.

Corporate pages carry a different kind of information. In the UK, water companies sit under the economic regulator Ofwat and the Environment Agency, and the Environment Agency publishes dated press releases on prosecutions; owners, regulators and court outcomes are therefore part of the record. This guide treats them as dated facts, set out alongside the history of each company and the palette and type choices made for it.

From the Shannon to Dublin.

The largest project on the utility’s books is the Water Supply Project for the Eastern and Midlands Region. As described to an Oireachtas committee and reported by The Irish Times in June 2026, it would take water from the Parteen Basin on the lower Shannon and pipe it 174 kilometres to a new treatment plant at Peamount, Co Dublin, to supplement supply to the capital and surrounding counties. The newspaper described it as the biggest water-supply infrastructure project in the State’s history. The company told the committee it expected construction to begin in 2028 and finish by 2032; its planning documents run to about 30,000 pages, and the proposal has been opposed by some landowners and communities around Parteen and along the route, the paper reported. Officials said the current abstraction rate from the River Liffey was 40 per cent, and that the project would run alongside work to reduce leakage from pipes.

The company’s own statements put that work in long-term terms. Its website describes a Water Services Strategic Plan built on “a national and long term approach” to planning water services, sets out a vision of “a sustainable Ireland where water is respected and protected,” and describes the move of local authority water-services staff into the utility as “the next phase in the transformation of the water sector in Ireland.”

For a design guide, Uisce Éireann shows how a bilingual name can be ranked on purpose: the Irish name leads by law, and the English one is kept in second place by design. Compare Scottish Water, another publicly owned national utility, and Welsh Water, a utility that also works in two languages. For this guide we use a deep river blue, a slate ink and a pale mist with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Uisce Éireann’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.