Ms Karin Dubsky:

It is also how society works. Yes, farmers may be the largest pressure, but if you want to get to good status for a particular catchment, it may not be possible to reach it unless you address other things like a small sewage treatment plant that might not be working properly. In the EIP in which I was involved, officially the EPA said to put pressure on agriculture. That was it. We worked with the farmers but also other landowners. Some of the other landowners love fertiliser so we had to try to reduce that. This involved houses with large gardens.

Then we came to the sewage treatment plant where Irish Water would not give us the information. We tested above and below and saw that, lo and behold, there was a lot coming out of there. We need buy-in from others and not just farmers, because we did not reach the nitrates concentration we wanted to reach and we did not get the buy-in from Irish Water. It removed a tertiary treatment system on that treatment plant. After an FOI request, Irish Water did acknowledge there was an issue. We need a catchment approach where everybody works together. In the beginning, everybody said the farmer was the problem while, in the end, we said we all have to continue working together to solve this with everybody contributing.