Why Ireland’s Rivers Are Dying¿

Rivers. Let's not pretend like we don't need them. They're one of the most important pieces of natural infrastructure, and there's enough of them in Ireland that if you placed them end-to-end, they'd circle the planet almost twice. They flow through our towns and cities, across valleys and farms. They're homes to cormorants and herons, otters and eels, where salmon return home to spawn. There's an entire living world in and around the water. Bad news though, sorry. They're in a state of decline. Nearly three quarters of our estuaries are polluted. All the numbers are going the wrong way. We've gone from having nearly 600 pristine river sites in 1990 to just 41. So whose fault is that, and what can we do to fix it? We have all these agencies and within each of them a collection of systems. But who's actually responsible for making the river better? And the answer is no one, you know. And that's the kind of thing that we would have been mistakenly assuming that some department or some person has a job that entails ultimate responsibility for the river. But what we actually have is just a collection of systems that support like the idea of a river. Like, you know, conceptually I get it. When a section of river flows through a quilcha forest, they're responsible. Sometimes. Maybe. If it flows through a farm, the responsibility changes again. We have infrastructure such as dams managed by the ESB, Inland Fisheries Ireland, the EPA, the OPW, Ishcare, and they're all systems. LawPro, the river basin management service, works then in partnership with local authorities, public bodies, and communities. But they also don't have overarching responsibility for the ecological outcome of the river, nor do they have powers to direct the bodies that affect it. In Fermoy, the decline can be felt across the town. The river Blackwater was once an internationally recognized fishing destination with hotels, tackle shops, and services built around visiting anglers. Gradually though, they've all disappeared. Much like the salmon that once ran through these waters in enormous numbers. And even as river systems are struggling, we're asking more and more of them. South of Killaloo is the Parteen Basin, built as part of the Shannon hydroelectric scheme completed in 1929. This man-made reservoir feeds a 12-kilometer head race canal to the turbines at Ardnock, Russia. And it's hard to imagine that it once provided almost all of Ireland's electricity requirement. A bold and pioneering infrastructure project from an era of pride. It was one of the defining achievements of the young Irish state, and it also changed the river forever. The European eel is critically endangered, but that doesn't make it any less slimy. Born in the Sagaso Sea on the other side of the Atlantic, they arrive in Irish rivers as tiny glass eels. It's one of nature's most extraordinary migrations. Eels live for decades in our lakes and rivers before returning home to reproduce. But it's not all plain sailing. At Ardnock, Russia, Inland Fisheries Ireland estimate the hydroelectric turbines kill more than one in five migrating eels. IFI can investigate and propose solutions, but it doesn't have the power to make those a reality. The eel unfortunately didn't know that, so unaware of jurisdictional boundaries they are. In 2014, over 330,000 eels were killed at ESP's hydroelectric station in Ballyshannon. Around a quarter of the elver population entering the Arran system that year. But they came on a bank holiday weekend and nobody was checking the traps, which became full and the eels suffocated from lack of oxygen. A quarter of the whole river system's intake for the year died because it was a public holiday. Nearly a century after the Shannon was engineered for electricity, fish passage remains unsolved. And coming up on that anniversary, we're about to ask even more of the same river. There's a growing fear in Dublin that they might all die of thirst. Water infrastructure hasn't kept pace with growth. An inter-basin water transfer is planned. A 172 kilometre pipe connecting the Parteen basin to the capital, siphoning water from the Shannon. But is a long pipe the best option? Building a massive impounding reservoir is probably just too much effort for the state at this point. The last time we built one was in the 1940s. It's been 84 years. In that time, the population's increased by two and a half million people, nearly double. But no reservoir for Dublin, no tidal barrier for Cork. We live in a country where the worst option is the most desirable. Maybe we just don't have the money or the ambition or the skills to do things correctly. And nowhere could that be more true than in Blackpool. During the 18th century, this village was the heart of Ireland's sailcloth industry. Through bust and boom, the bride has always flowed here. But in the 1990s, the OPW started culverting it. And what followed was a sequence of devastating floods. Now they're back, with a 20 million euro plan to bury this river for good. The choice ultimately presented to residents was essentially concrete or flooding. With over a thousand submissions in support and 95 against, the community supported the only solution it was offered. But that wasn't the only solution. The River Bride is a green corridor, and home to over half of Cork City's known otter population. Their home soon to be buried alive. The OPW didn't present the community with all the options. An upstream flood attenuation lake allowing water to pool safely was a viable and cheaper alternative. But that was almost treated like a secret. A High Court case ensued, and the state ultimately conceded over the consultation process. Albeit too little too late for the otters. Cities in the developed world are deculverting historically buried rivers and restoring natural systems. And we could be doing the same. But in the OPW's zeal for concrete, we're getting ready to put another one underground. Thank you for calling Inland Fisheries Ireland. Please hold for a section. It's August 2025. Reports are coming in fast. Shoals of dead fish washing up against the riverbank. The event would subsequently become the largest fish kill in the history of the state, across 39 kilometres of the river. Time is short. Pathology indicates exposure to a waterborne environmental irritant. Utilities upstream of the disaster are being checked. Only the previous year, a spill of polyaluminium chloride killed over 5,000 fish in a Blackwater tributary. Ishka heroin was fined €3,500. But they're not the source this time. Investigators look to Canterk. North Cork Creameries pleaded guilty to eight environmental licence breaches in 2024. And the EPA have found, yet again, serious licence breaches at the plant. Its permission to discharge wastewater is suspended. Inland Fisheries Ireland and the Marine Institute are working closely together. Around 900 chemicals are tested. But, despite the investigation, neither the pollution nor its source could be determined. The investigation found no casual link between the creamery and the fish kill. No link to Ishka heroin. A second wastewater discharge suspension halted milk processing at Canterk in March 2026. In April, a conviction over a separate illegal discharge into the river. After extensive remediation works, operations restarted on a phased basis. A European Commission report later identified what it called a detection gap. It suggests the pollutants may have entered the Blackwater five days before the authorities were notified. The river flows, and with it, the clues to identify the cause of the tragedy. But most pollution doesn't arrive in a single catastrophic spill. It arrives gradually, drop by drop, field by field. As the last glaciers retreated from Ireland, they scoured the land, leaving behind crushed rock, clay, sand and gravel. Combined with thousands of years of Atlantic rainfall, that created two broadly different landscapes. Across much of the North and West, the heavy Atlantic rainfall contributed to heavier, slow-draining soils. Water travels across or close to the surface. But in the drier South and Southeast, freely draining soils allow water to percolate down to the groundwater. That distinction is key as we start farming on top of it. These picture-perfect postcard fields are not something we think of as a green desert. The perennial ryegrass produces huge quantities of high-quality forage. Nitrogen and phosphorus are added to maintain that productivity, and phosphorus binds to the soil. So when runoff leaves a field, it takes the phosphorus with it. Our agricultural water quality policies include measures to prevent But nitrogen is trickier. On the freely draining lands of the South and Southeast, nitrates can travel down through the soil and into the groundwater before reaching rivers and estuaries. A major source of that nitrate in grazed dairy systems is cattle urine. All those stomachs, but still only one bladder. But it's not just cattle urine landing on fields. Our own waste, the processed sludge from wastewater treatment plants, that's also being spread on Irish farms. Within that sludge, something new. Forever chemicals, or PFAS. Recent EPA research found PFAS exceeding the ecological risk threshold in over half of Irish sediment samples tested. Measures designed to stop nutrients travelling across the surface are much less effective when the nutrients are travelling down. And when milk quotas disappeared in 2015, the dairy herd expanded, putting considerably more nitrogen through the system. Across much of the landscape, extraordinarily complex grassland ecosystems of hay meadows, wet grasslands and species-rich pastures have been progressively simplified, replacing biological functions with external inputs. Researchers from Chagosk tried adding microbial inoculants to intensively managed grasslands, which ultimately did little for productivity. But changing the plants did. Grass, legume, herbs, swards substantially improved forage production and nutrient uptake. Clover fixes nitrogen from the atmosphere, reducing the requirement for manufactured nitrogen. Deep-rooting herbs reach parts of the soil that ryegrass doesn't, capturing water and nutrients at different depths and improving soil structure. In Irish trials, 30% plantain added to grass clover swards reduced nitrate leaching on freely draining soils by 56% in the first year and by more than 96% in the second. Other Irish grazing research has found grass, clover and multi-species systems capable of producing comparable quantities of forage with substantially less chemical nitrogen. And while plantain can fade from multi-species swards after a few years, the principle of bringing back diversity to the intensive grasslands is impossible to ignore. It's inexpensive, low-tech, already understood and proven. For too long, our rivers have been treated as infrastructure, not as ecosystems. They're something to dam, to divert, water to drink and water to carry our waste to sea. But rivers are living systems and increasingly, some of the solutions look remarkably like allowing natural systems to work again. Space for rivers and the animals that call them home. Up till now, you might have assumed that someone, some department is in charge of reversing their decline. But even with all of the systems that exist, all the institutions and all the money being spent, nobody is ultimately responsible for their quality. Responsibility for rivers is carved up according to everything we want from them. But the river doesn't know who owns the forest, farms the field, operates the dam or approve the plan. Ireland is missing somebody whose success is measured by one simple outcome. Did the river get better? Imagine if it did. Salmon returning in numbers to our rivers and lakes. International anglers back in Fremont, a fishing destination once more. Supporting tourism with visitors staying in hotels, eating in pubs and spending their money in the shops. A river once again supporting an economy as much as it supports an ecosystem. Clean rivers, sanctuaries for birds and a haven for otters. Rivers that are given space to flood safely rather than being forced underground. We know that culverting and brute concrete finishes are not the only path forward. Upstream, an eel that arrived here over 20 years ago, returning home on one of nature's strangest journeys. Passing safely through the barriers we've built, out into the Atlantic and back to the Sagosa Sea. And none of this is impossible. We know how to restore rivers. We know right from wrong. What we need is somebody whose job it is to make the river better. Jurisdiction stops at a boundary, all the while the river flows.