Mr. Kevin Bakhurst:

The estimation of crowd sizes is a perennial problem. If there is software to estimate crowd sizes I am not aware of it but I would welcome it. Somebody said to me once that one should count the number of legs and divide by two. It is difficult because there are always competing narratives. Nobody is ever happy with the opposing narrative. There is often a disparity between the size of the crowed estimated by the organisers of the events and the size of the crowd estimated by An Garda Síochána or other observers. As a matter of policy we would try to give a range of estimates.

All we can do is put the information in front of the audience by reporting that the Garda said, "this many people were in attendance", and that the organisers said, "that many people were in attendance". The spread-out nature of last weekend's water protests meant that the entire crowd was never in a single place at the same time. It is very difficult to make an estimate in such circumstances. Frankly, it is not something we consider would be the right thing for us to do. One can get a feel for whether the size of a crowd is closer to 100 or 1,000, but it is much more difficult when one is talking in tens of thousands.