Ms Sinéad O'Brien:

I have four points to make and I will focus on two of them. I would like to reiterate what Dr. Crowe said about looking at the catchments where there are river trusts already working. I think that is a good place to start because they have people who are motivated and interested on the ground already. I am going to come back to the point we made about resourcing and funding them properly. We cannot expect local groups to run a public awareness campaign on their local river, all done on a voluntary basis. They need staff. That is one recommendation. The other recommendation I would make is that this consultation and work on the river basin management plan is an opportunity for us to be a lot more honest about the quality of our water. I have found that people have been contacting SWAN a lot more in the past couple of years now that there is much more recreational use of water. However, those people are still very confused about the quality of the water. For example, last year and the year before, when there were swimming bans on beaches in County Clare, it was very unclear as to what the cause was. There was a lack of information for people. As was mentioned, often one cannot tell from the water that it is polluted. In fact, we know that in a lot of cases, the rivers are not swimmable, to use Dr. McGoff's words. I think the State needs to start being honest about the waters that are not healthy for use. In that case, people would become a lot more aware of it. I had an engagement with a recreational stakeholder group recently, where I raised the issue of unhealthy water quality in an area of a blue way that was being promoted locally. They said they did not want to know because people might not want to use the blue way then. To pick up on Dr. McGoff's point, political leadership is needed, even from a public health point of view, if we want to continue expanding our water-based tourism and recreation.