Dr. Elaine McGoff:

It is a really good question. It is one that we ask ourselves. We have campaigned on this area and we want to get as much traction as possible mong the public. One way to gain attention is to follow the lead of New Zealand, where they massively ramped up their dairy intensification. Then there were swimming bans across the country and absolute outrage. Obviously, it would be nice not have to get to that stage. I think one of the key things is political leadership. I would hope that politicians will not wait for people to come knocking on their doors to take action. The fact that the committee has invited us here today indicates that that is very much not the case, and I commend the members for that. In An Taisce, we get a lot of people contacting us about various issues. Many of those issues are to do with water quality, but, harking back to Ms O'Brien's point, the problem is that nobody has ultimate responsibility for this. People contact us and ask who to contact. We tell them who to contact and they are essentially given the run around. They have recognised a problem, they have identified it and they know what the issue is, but they find it very difficult to get anybody to take action. That is where Ms O'Brien's suggestion of having 46 catchment officers could be hugely valuable in terms of engaging the public in water quality. The officers could raise awareness and could help fix issues. At the moment, the members of the public with whom we are dealing are becoming completely disillusioned and they are giving up. Perhaps they are not going to their politicians because it seems that nobody cares about water quality. I would very much like to see political leadership get to the point where we have people that are responsible for water quality and people to whom the public can turn, so that we can shine some light on this and gain traction with the public.