Richard O'Donoghue (Limerick County, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I understand the 25 cu. m. basically takes out most of the farms ranging from small to medium size. If we consider water extraction where it is being used for irrigation or cooling, my issue is when we have a very hot summer and where certain people's crops are under threat, they go to the rivers to extract water to try to keep their crops going. I have seen in one or two years where they have brought our waterways way down by extracting water such that it interfered with fishing and everything within our waterways. There are so many points where a person could abstract water that it could not be policed.

Turning to flooding from heavy rainfall, in County Limerick we have recently seen that water was being trapped because of lack of maintenance on rivers which have not been dredged or cleaned out. The proper flow of the rivers could not be monitored because the flow range was blocked due to lack of maintenance for up to 15 years. Again, we cannot check out the proper water flow because water was being lodged on land. Then, when the water level lowers, it gets released but in the meantime people who are not actually on floodplains are getting flooded because waterways are blocked. In order to get the proper reading for waterways, they need to be cleaned out once and then maintained. How can we monitor this however if that proper maintenance has not been done in 15 to 20 years?