Jennifer Whitmore (Wicklow, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

As we are limited on time, I am moving back to the issue of barriers. When we hear the statistics about the numbers of returning salmon, it is awful and horrific. It is similar with eels. The numbers returning now are 8% of what we would have seen in the seventies. They are really at a critical point.

The biggest thing we can do is remediation and carry out the removal of barriers to those migratory species. I have been doing some work on this in Wicklow. One third of the upstream catchments in Wicklow cannot be accessed by migratory species because they are blocked in one way or another. We are working with IFI, through the East Wicklow Rivers Trust, on a remediation programme for a couple of weirs in Wicklow. this needs to be broadened out.

The biggest bang for our buck is when we look at State agencies. This goes across nature protection in general. It is about what the State agencies are doing and how we can manage that. It comes back to the Shannon and the barriers there, and how the ESB is managing the migratory patterns of salmon and eels going up through its systems. Is it true that IFI has no regulatory or statutory responsibility over what happens at the ESB stations?