Professor Ken Whelan:

By way of transparency, it is important that I say I was consultant on the River Bandon project at the end. My former colleague and good friend, Martin O’Grady, who passed away, had been doing that work and I was asked to implement Mr. O’Grady’s restoration programme on the post-drainage situation. In the Bandon example, I believe the river was dropped by something like 1.3 m. On the positives, it was the bottom end of the river, which was very good because there were 60 km odd upstream. That was really the factory which was probably producing the bulk of the fish. I was very surprised when I did my initial survey on it in how quickly the river struggled to come back. The one thing worth mentioning is that we are very fortunate in Ireland to have very resilient waterways. We should not be pushing them the way we are, which is patently clear, but they respond very well and very quickly. We also took back some of the gravels from the mountain which the Chairman described and put it back in the river.