Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 5 July 2023
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine
Ireland's Water Quality: Discussion
Michael Fitzmaurice (Roscommon-Galway, Independent)
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I will ask a few questions and get it on record. Regarding the EPA, we saw a case last week where evidence was required from the EPA and it was not able to produce it. Let us say farming organisations had a body or scientist that wanted to look at all the information. Has all of this been checked? I am involved in a group water scheme where you keep samples of the water. Is there a backup for all that evidence that has been given if the likes of farming organisations had their own science people who wanted to look at it? As chairman of a group water scheme, 20 or 25 years ago, there was a certain threshold of different things we had to do and that threshold has gone up to different scales. I do not have a problem with that but are we sampling different ways now or at different levels than we were years ago?
I had better go but I will return.