Dr. Elaine McGoff:

On land drainage, SWAN has called for an immediate prohibition on wetland drainage in the draft river basin management plan. That was not provided for. The reason we are looking for this is twofold. There is both authorised and unauthorised wetland drainage. I will deal first with land drainage by the OPW under the arterial drainage scheme.

As I said there are 11,500 km of waterways which are drained by the OPW. The Act is from 1945 and represents a previous era where they relied on a clause that called for the proper repair and effective condition of these drained wetlands. In essence, the OPW is saying that its hands are tied and it is statutorily obliged to maintain these waterways and keep dredging. However, it is questionable how that fits with EU law in terms of the water framework directive and the habitats directive. This is why SWAN is calling for a review of the Arterial Drainage Act 1945. It needs to be modernised and brought into line with EU law. This underlines the fact that planning legislation is failing to provide for water quality. Arterial drainage is going through all of the hoops but it is still incredibly damaging. Why is that happening? What are the failings? The draft river basin management plan states new legislation will be put in place to deal with this matter but the language is incredibly woolly. It is unclear what it will do and what the timelines are. As such, I do not see a solution to this coming down the line in the near future.

There is also the issue of unauthorised drainage. We know this is an issue but it is unclear how widespread it is. Is it just landowners draining bits of their land such as wet corners of fields? The local authority waters programme, LAWPRO, has flagged this as a significant issue in terms of silt pollution. I presume that would be a mix of both the authorised and unauthorised drainage. In essence, land drainage is happening and is damaging whether it is authorised or unauthorised. Given the impacts, we really need to up our game in terms of the regulatory structure overseeing land drainage and have an enforcement plan to cut out the unauthorised drainage.