Professor Tom Collins:

No. Our work on rivers is so focused on salmon and the salmonid species. Again, I should have said in my address but I have it in the statement that we have a project on the Boyne led by a small team. It is on the Knightsbrook River outside Trim where people are restoring spawning grounds by putting gravel into the river. I saw the Boyne being drained in the 1970s and there was a devastating impact on the river and on the landscape. Obviously people who have been protected from flooding since then would not agree with me on that but we probably need to look at joined-up thinking in this regard. For instance, I suspect much of the flooding of the Boyne occurred due to the depletion of the bogs to the west of Trim. Are there other ways of retaining a great cistern of water? The Boyne in summer is reduced to a trickle and in the winter it floods. We need a management system that is very different. I am sorry, I do not want to be going on.