Professor Ken Whelan:

They re-established to some extent. There are mitigation measures that could be taken, but I agree that it was a tough drainage scheme in terms of the level of works that were deemed necessary to avoid flooding in the town.

I will make a more general point, if I may. Through my consultancy, I am dealing with a small catchment in County Mayo, which is seeing many of these problems in miniature. The first time I met the local farmers was two years ago on the bridge. We were discussing the flooding. They had a simple solution – they wanted all the trees taken down from the riverbank and for any areas with deep pools or slow-flowing waters to be drained. That was going to solve the problem and it would flush all the water away into the sea. When we started to work with the farmers and discuss the matter with them, though, we needed to find out what we could do. This relates to the Chair’s point about how we might see the OPW or a similar agency in the future. We began discussing with the farmers the idea that maybe they were not farmers after all, but land farmers and water stewards. We do not recognise farmers as water stewards, but farmers are the guardians of the water resources that are on their lands, and some of those resources are critical.

We took out a map – the farmers are still laughing at this – and, off the top of my head, I identified a particular area that I thought would be useful for what we call a nature-based solution. I asked what would happen if we funded the farmer to allow the land in that area to be flooded, with it acting as a reservoir during those large floods. The farmer would be handsomely compensated for that. We would then trickle feed the water back down towards the town over the following months. Of course, the land I picked belonged to the chairman of the local IFA and I got a very strong reaction from him. However, these are the sorts of radical solution we need to be considering. The OPW is interested in this. It depends on the remit and the speed at which that remit has to be met, but there are nature-based solutions. If we are dealing with vast quantities of water the likes of which we have not seen before, we have to think about different and new ways of dealing with the issue. It will not be possible to treat these beautiful rivers as channels, which is why I made that point. In my mind, these are not channels, but living entities. If we are to deal with these problems as well as the other issues that exist, we have to look at rivers in a different way. It is a question of combining the wonderful biological expertise that we have in the likes of IFI and the National Parks and Wildlife Service with the OPW in a much more cohesive way, considering this issue in the totality of the catchment and trying to understand the interactions and the physical nature of the challenges involved. I firmly believe that there are solutions, but that we need to fund the people who own the land to help us find them in a novel and different way.