Mr. Shane Herlihy:

We are obviously comparing slightly different things. The research catchments down in Timoleague and the other catchments under the agricultural catchments programme undergo a lot of scientific rigour with a real-time monitoring - it is every ten minutes, as the Senator says. We cannot expect that to be implemented at a national scale for all the water bodies we have. Monthly samples, one sample 12 times a year, are probably okay but we need to recognise they are a grab sample once a month. It is probably all that is available under funding for all the monitoring programmes but when we interpret the data, it is really important we understand what we are actually measuring and from what we are trying to draw conclusions.