Professor Patrick Fitzpatrick:

I will continue on the water theme. There is a UN environment programme, EP, called the global environment monitoring system, GEMS. This is a set of monitoring stations for clean water throughout the globe. There are approximately 200 of these. The data are owned or managed and curated by one of the UN countries. At the moment Canada owns them until early 2014. There is now an opportunity for Ireland to take over the data management, with UCC leading, potentially in collaboration with a university in Germany. I spoke to the Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government, Deputy Hogan, on Friday last when he came to UCC to raise the green flag. He gave me permission to mention that he is confident that this will now happen and that we will be managing this major data management system for water quality measurement around the globe.

Mr. Lahiff referred to the programme in Tigray. I imagine many committee members saw the video shown last week at the Hunger-Nutrition-Climate Justice event. Agriculture, water table raising and similar issues form part of the whole programme in Tigray.