Mr. Conor Arnold:

I thank the Cathaoirleach and members of the committee for the invitation to come today. I am the chairperson of Killavullen Angling Club. I own an angling centre where I teach fly-casting and run a day-ticket salmon fishery on the River Blackwater. I am also an APGAI Ireland qualified fly-casting instructor and a pro-team member for LOOP Tackle and Patagonia.

On 11 August 2025, a catastrophic fish kill was reported to Inland Fisheries Ireland. Up to 32,000 salmon and brown trout plus another 10,000 of other fish species were killed in this pollution event according to the interagency group report published last week. These numbers do not include juvenile fish or fry, which are up to one or two inches in length. With this in mind, the number of fished killed could actually run into the hundreds of thousands.

What followed was a fundamentally flawed and unco-ordinated investigation. It took 12 days to get preliminary test results in the first instance, whereas it took our club a mere 24 hours to get preliminary results from an EU accredited laboratory. It took three days for the Marine Institute to arrive on-site and take moribund fish samples. It took 14 days to set up an interagency group to investigate the event. It took 15 and 18 days, respectively, to take sample fish from a tributary of a main river for residue sampling. There was no procedural advice for river users, or indeed the public, with regard to health and safety from the chemical irritant or disinfection protocols from the secondary fungal infection. Ultimately, the time lost and the State bodies' complete inability to observe international best practices during their investigations have resulted in a lack of evidence due to the fact that most of it had been washed away.

This has made an appropriate prosecution very difficult. On 20 August, the EPA stated there was no causal link to North Cork Creameries. Would someone please explain to me how any facility with a track record of having multiple convictions for pollution, as well as having 125 non-compliance notices since March 2020, could be excluded from an investigation when further samples were only taken for residue testing on 26 and 29 August? In other words, all of the evidence was not available at the time of the publication of the report.

Sadly, these fish are now dead and gone. This catastrophic fish kill has passed us but what we need to happen next is as follows: an extensive habitat restoration programme; constant water quality monitors to be strategically placed into the river but paid for by every discharge facility as part of their EPA licence criteria - these monitors need to be under the remit of a rapid response team to give one single focal point in any investigation and this system needs to be always transparent to the public; a fish counter installed in the lower reaches of the river to monitor returning migratory species; the removal of all commercial netting; increased fines and other stringent stipulations on all facilities that discharge into the River Blackwater and its tributaries; and an independent inquiry into all departmental bodies involved, focusing on protocol and timelines.

The distressing scenes of thousands of dead and dying fish in the River Blackwater have outraged the community and we demand answers and solutions. We simply cannot allow this to happen anywhere in this country again. The conservation, recreation and angling reputation of Ireland depends on what we do next. To quote a well-known legal maxim, without prosecution, there is no crime and no law.