Mr. Francis O'Donnell:

There are three parts to the Deputy's question. I will endeavour to pick up all of them, and if I miss out on any aspect, please come back to me. In terms of what we do, we set out what our priorities as an agency are at the start of the year. It is broken out into RBDs, so we have a director in each river basin district. We clearly set out what is called a protection plan every year where we believe the hot spots are and where we believe, for the want of a better word, nefarious activity may be undertaken within those catchment areas. We have staff on the ground 24 hours per day, 365 days per year. We have an unusual system whereby we do not pay overtime but we have an unsocial hours allowance which allows us to put two teams in, sometimes within catchments, one team in from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and the other team in from 10 p.m. until 4 a.m.

One of the Deputy's questions was whether our catchments are getting any better. We will break it out into fisheries first. With fishery officers on the ground within those catchments around the country, a lot of those river systems we know were being very intensively poached over the years have recovered where we increased our protection efforts in recent years in various parts of the country. We know that from looking at our catch data from counters. That is the first thing I would say. It is quite a hard metric to measure, but if we leave a salmon river, for example, in Donegal, Galway or Cork, unmanned for a summer season, I can guarantee at the end of the season there will be very little left there to talk about. That is the first thing.

In terms of water quality, we undertake water quality inspections all of the time. We respond to them all of the time. We take prosecutions in this area. We are probably down to doing 15 or 20 prosecutions per year. I do not believe it is enough. I believe that if we had more staff on the ground to detect water quality issues within catchments, because there is the diffuse aspect I spoke about and we have the point source, and we have to walk a river from top to bottom regularly to find out where that pollution is actually entering, so it is very resource intensive-----