Dr. Greg Forde:

I will deal briefly with the matter of water pollution. This is one of the staff's top priorities in respect of the protection of our waters and fish stocks. The Deputy made reference to one particular instance and as that matter is before our legal department at present, we are not really in a position to give the joint committee further details on that. However, we are involved in pollution cases through the courts in three or four different areas. One is at a municipal level and in that respect, we are somewhat at loggerheads with local authorities and perhaps with Irish Water in the future, as we push repeatedly for the upgrading of water treatment works. I acknowledge there now is in place an enormous programme for upgrading sewage treatment plants, which hopefully will take some of the pressure off in this regard.

Other matters are agriculture-related, such as silage and slurry effluent and again, there is a huge push within the farming community to improve practices there. We are also doing a lot of joint work with Teagasc on best farm practices and things like that to try to help to improve matters. We still have problems and we take a serious line in this regard to ensure the standard is maintained. There is much ongoing activity like that. In some years, it is really down to how the rainfall comes because slurry can be spread at certain times of the year but this can also be done inappropriately. For example, if one spreads the slurry just before a big heavy shower of rain, the next thing is all the nutrients will go into the rivers and problems will arise. We are getting away from the position that used to obtain years ago whereby putting the slurry out on the land was a disposal mechanism, rather than an enrichment mechanism to enable crops to grow and we are working on that.

This year, we have had 27 fish kills, which means there have been 27 occasions when, as a consequence of some activity, fish have died.

Some have been related to simple little things such as rivers drying out. We have probably had more little streams drying out this year than in the past 25 years. Some of them are caused by small amounts of pollution but in a river that is at a very low level. There is a cohort of staff who are specifically briefed on water pollution and they work on that.

The second element to the Deputy's question was working with other agencies. In the last one I mentioned Teagasc. We have many ongoing river restoration programmes with the Office of Public Works where we are trying to integrate with its legal remit, which is maintaining certain drainage programmes around the country. We have it doing so in a much more fish-friendly and habitat-friendly way. It is similar with Waterways Ireland with regard to weed clearance. We dovetail with it regarding fish stocks in the waterways it manages and controls, such as the canals and the Barrow.

We work closely with the EPA regarding issues we believe have an EPA element to them, and it contacts us if it believes there is a fisheries matter. We do a lot of work with it and we also bring EPA personnel out in our RIBs when they need to get samples in estuaries or offshore. Dr. Byrne mentioned bass, which falls under the remit of the Sea-Fisheries Protection Authority. We are the warranted officers who control the bass now. That is an arrangement between the two organisations. All our staff are warranted for the next two years by the SFPA and we carry out work on the protection of bass because it is an angling-only species. There is no commercial TAC - no quota - for commercial boats to land bass. As a consequence our fishery officers - I have my warrant in my bag - can protect bass.