Mr. John Murphy:

It will not, in a nutshell. Many different factors have to be looked at, such as those Mr. Buckley touched on earlier, including climate, soil type, stocking rate and activity. The one in Timoleague has no treatment plant and does not have a substantial amount of human activity above the test centres. There are bore holes from which samples were taken in the past 12 years and they have shown us over time that weather is a big influence. Its stocks have increased substantially since 2015 and the outflows have not increased. I have asked several times why these results, which have been available for 12 years at this stage, are not taken into account by the EPA. The answer seems to be that the tests are not done by a statutory body. The results are not used because the EPA is the statutory body. We wonder if a closer look was taken at what Eddie Burgess and his team are doing in this area, whether we would be shown in a more favourable light. The margin of error was already mentioned, the small increase or decrease or so-called trend. We had a drought in 2018 which was problematic for us because the advice given to farmers at the time was that they should put out additional nitrogen at the end of the year. The Minister even got an exemption after the closed period to grow more fodder. In hindsight, that has turned out to have been a big mistake. It gave us a blip in the mark. It has already been stated that the nitrates level in the water has been relatively flat for the past 15 years. There are very small ups and downs, although the stock density has increased in some parts of the country. Cow numbers have gone up. We hope that the EPA will look at these issues in the catchment areas in a more favourable light in its next report.