Mr. Kris Murphy:

I represent the Slaney River Trust. The Slaney is an amazing, hugely important river. It is a critical system. There are a few reasons for that. First, it is a largely multi-sea winter salmon run river. It is probably one of the few remaining rivers of that type in the country. For a lot of the rivers in Ireland, the bulk of the salmon will go out to sea and spend a single winter at sea, whereas with the Slaney they will spend a number of years at sea. That means they are bigger, their spawning potential is bigger. We are very lucky at the Slaney River Trust that we have Professor Whelan's expertise; he will probably be better at explaining the benefits of this. We are at a crossroads now where we can actually fix the issues of barriers. The Slaney River Trust has done a lot of work. Up to now, it has largely been left in the hands of groups like ourselves to go in and try to sort out these problems. Really our role would be to try to bring together all the State agencies. There has not really been a facility in place to bring together the county council, IFI, the National Parks and Wildlife Service, the OPW, the EPA, all those organisations.

In the past the issues around Clohamon have been a bit of a hot potato; I am sure the members are all aware it has been a hot topic. Clohamon is a village on the River Slaney and there is a hydro facility there. There is a weir at the hydro facility and the river splits in two. One portion of the river goes down into the hydro facility and the other portion goes down the main channel, then, at the bottom, after the turbines, the tailrace joins the main river. We have two issues there. There was a planning application put forward in 2014. It was done with IFI funding; I think only about €15,000 was allocated. The planning application failed. There was very limited funding and the €15,000 would not have covered the sheer amount of reports and work that needed to be done. There are fish passes on the weir itself but there is a problem with fish passage over the weir. There are two fish passes and neither of them is very good. There is a need there to create a fish pass. The design at the time was a rocky ramp. As Dr. Gallagher said, the ideal solution would be to have no barrier. There was an option that would have facilitated this but, due to financial and other reasons from the State, it was deemed not to be an option. The second best option was to go after a rock ramp. The application went in. There were a few refusals on it. There were objections from IFI, actually, and from some of the owners. It is a complex situation down there, with several interests. There were some objections from the public which were mainly around the water flows. There is a guideline from IFI that states that 12.5% of the mean flow plus an extra 50% of the overall flow should be allocated to the main channel.

Unfortunately, negotiations with the hydro facility owners would not go far enough to meet that guideline. There were very successful negotiations at the time with the facility owners to negotiate a flow of 3 cu. m, which is a significant amount of water in low-water scenarios, but it just was not enough to meet the guidelines. That particular planning application was stopped dead back then so we decided to split up the two main issues at Clohamon into separate bits to try to tackle them individually.