Professor Ken Whelan:

Yes. At the other Newport river in County Mayo, I was running what was called the Salmon Research Agency at the time, and we were asked by the owners to put together what at that stage was an original idea, that is, this idea of a catchment plan. We put together the catchment plan and we realised quite quickly that we had all of these competing interests. When we produced our plan, I called a meeting in Newport. I asked all of the agencies to come with a projection over the following five years of what their ideal water requirements would be. We asked representatives from the EPA, OPW, the county council and so on. I had a little blackboard and a piece of chalk. We started the meeting with everyone giving me millions of litres. We totted it up, and it was 110% of the water flow of the river. The lesson was that they were not speaking to one another. They did not realise that all of them had these competing demands. I know that is very simplistic but that, in essence, is part of our problem because of the way the legislation is.

Certainly, having, as I said earlier, worked with some of the really excellent young engineers in the OPW, I feel that these people do not have access to the knowledge about where the expertise lies at the design stage of their programmes. I explained to them the sort of expertise that is available in the National Parks and Wildlife Service, NPWS, and in IFI. At the higher levels, this might be understood, but these are the chaps who are drawing up the designs and they are not aware of the hydrological information and so on that the teams in IFI have so we have to find a way to bring the sister groups together. How do we do that? We start at the end point, which is the rivers. For example, let us take one river, such as the Shannon. There has been a cry for a long time to have a Shannon authority. Perhaps we do not have to go that far, but if we took a single river system and asked each of the bodies what its responsibilities were in the context of that river, they would begin to see the overlap and, I think, the solutions. The solutions may lie in the expertise in their sister bodies. Especially nowadays, there is a broad spectrum of expertise that can be available and is somewhat hidden in these organisations. Our legislation is totally out of date in my view with respect to facing that crisis. We have to label it crisis management and we have to do it on an individual river basis.

I will make a point so I do not forget it. It is important to remember the rivers and streams that do not have anything on them. There is a good programme ongoing in the Pacific north west at the moment called the stronghold programme. It is looking for strongholds. It is looking for the River Oykels in the area, that is the rivers that are to a large extent in tact and functioning well. They are making absolutely certain they are ring-fenced for the future before they go near any barriers or anything else. It is a good lesson. We should not forget that we have some really nice, functioning medium-sized rivers and so on, that we need now to say to people are completely hands-off. These are strongholds and that they have different designation in legislation. That would also help.