Save our rivers: Blackwater under pressure as the number of pristine tributaries has halved
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When Tom Ankettell got a call at 4pm on Sunday, June 9, nothing could have prepared him for the devastation he was going to witness.
Mr Ankettell, the chairman of the Kanturk and District Trout Anglers Association, received word from his local Inland Fisheries Ireland (IFI) representative that something was seriously amiss with the fish on the River Allow near his home in North Cork.
Busy at the time, he knew that several club members were already near the scene, preparing for the National Fly Fishing Championships, which were due to take place on the river two weeks later. He quickly alerted them, and soon he was receiving shocking reports of the scene.
“They said there were fish jumping out of the water trying to get oxygen,” he recalls.
“There was nothing they could do: They were standing there and watching them dying in front of them.”
By the time Mr Ankettell arrived, he was looking at what he describes as “the worst fish kill I’ve ever seen".
"I’ve seen a lot of horrendous fish kills from the 1970s onwards, and the Allow is the worst. There were an estimated 6,500 fish dead, everywhere — trout, coarse fish, salmon, lampreys.
“The whole river wiped out, for 8km.”
Later, Uisce Éireann self-reported to the IFI and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that a chemical spill at Freemount Waste Water Treatment Plant had taken place.
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Some 2,500 litres of highly corrosive polyaluminium chloride, a chemical used as a coagulant in wastewater treatment, had leaked from a tank at the plant into the river.
“The first feeling is anger,” Mr Ankettell says. “Here we are in 2024, and we have a toxic chemical being stored within 50 yards of a river.”
The River Allow, a tributary of the mighty Munster Blackwater, is a special area of conservation and a habitat for the endangered freshwater pearl mussel.
In Kanturk, it joins the River Dallow, which flows into the Blackwater some 4km downstream.
Kanturk and District Trout Anglers Association had been due to hold the National Fly Fishing Championships on the Allow: This, and all other activities on the river, have been suspended indefinitely pending a full investigation of the impacts of the chemical release.
One of the reasons for Mr Ankettell’s anger is the waste, a sense that this one incident has erased more than 15 years of conservation and education.
Farmers in the area, now subject to a nitrates directive to improve water quality, had bought in enthusiastically to two conservation projects in the area, the €1.9m Duhallow Life project, and more recently, €1.46m in European Innovation Partnership funding for the Duhallow Farming for Blue Dot Catchments project.
“The amount of EU money since 2010 is vast,” he says. “All the local landowners bought into those projects. People did what they needed to: They had a lot of work put in, and they were very proud of what they had done.”
Mr Ankettell says the river is now being monitored to see if the population of freshwater pearl mussel, which can live for up to 150 years and are highly sensitive to water quality, will have survived the spill that wiped out so many other species.
But he believes it will take up to a decade for the river to repair the damage and for the natural stocking rates of fish species to return.
“The average size of a trout on a river like that would be about half a pound, and we had dead trout out of that river that were up to two pounds in weight,” he says.
“So there were a lot of older, larger fish killed.”
Uisce Éireann met with the local community and provided assurances that the failure that led to the chemical spill would not be able to recur. A prosecution is likely but, for Mr Ankettell and other members of the club, this is cold comfort.
“Prosecutions are fine and people must be answerable for their actions or inactions, but it’s not going to bring our river back to the way it was,” he says.
The tale of the Allow is a big, shocking, headline-grabbing event, but so many of the biggest pressures on Irish rivers, the Blackwater catchment included, are invisible, subtle, or unfold over such long periods of time that they go unobserved.
The River Blackwater, or Munster Blackwater, is one of the largest rivers in Ireland, flowing through Kerry, Cork, and Waterford.
It rises in the Mullaghareirk Mountains in Co Kerry and then flows in an easterly direction across Co Cork through the towns of Mallow and Fermoy.
It then enters Co Waterford where it flows through Lismore, before turning south at Cappoquin and finally draining into the Celtic Sea at Youghal Harbour in Cork.
The Blackwater is 169km long and is famed as one of the best salmon fishing rivers in the country.
Tributaries of the Blackwater include: River Awbeg, River Dalua, River Bride, River Allow, River Araglin, River Finnow, and River Funshion.
For David Lee, as he gazes across a wooded valley in the Ballyhoura region towards Ballyguyroe landfill site, cause and effect become
inexorably linked, in the case of rivers, over timeframes that dwarf a human working life.
In the 1990s, Mr Lee was involved in a High Court case taken by locals in the area to shut down the Cork County Council landfill, built on top of the regional aquifer and on land whose seasonal streams all feed into the River Farahy, which in turn feeds into the Funshion, and then the Blackwater.
The Blackwater is a large catchment taking in parts of West Waterford, South Tipperary, East Limerick, and North Cork, eventually entering the sea at Youghal.
Twenty-five years after the residents’ successful case, Cork County Council was prosecuted by the EPA in 2022 for their activities at the now-closed Ballyguyroe landfill, where seven two-acre cells of decomposing municipal waste continue to release gases and leachate.
The council was fined just under €10,000 and paid additional costs of €20,000 for emissions breaches of methane and carbon dioxide, for not having suitable staff on the site, and for discharging surface water contaminated with leachate into the catchment of the River Farahy.
In 2023, the EPA listed Ballyguyroe landfill as one of 13 on its national priority sites list. But it’s not the only threat to the Farahy that concerns Mr Lee.
Ballyhoura, on the Cork and Limerick border, is renowned for its beauty and amenities, popular for biking trails and walks.
The Glenanaar valley, now managed under forestry by Coillte, was immortalised in the early 1900s when Canon Patrick Sheehan, prolific author and parish priest of Doneraile, published a novel titled .
Forestry is now listed as the third largest pressure on water bodies in the EPA’s latest water quality report, after agriculture and hydromorphology, but before urban wastewater.
But its impacts are often not as obvious as other pressures: There may be the public perception that all forestry is natural, and it may be in remote places where fewer people are witness to its impacts.
Mr Lee pulls his car over and points out the source of the Farahy, showing how the river flows through the permeable valley soils, where plantations of Sitka spruce run with streams that enter the river.
The runoff from forestry contains nutrients including nitrates, and this effect is increased when the trees are felled for harvest.
On top of this, clear-felling with machinery ploughs up soil, creating silt and debris which then runs into streams following rainfall.
In managed forestry where blocks of trees are clear-felled in sequence, this creates cyclical damage that rivers can’t recover from, Mr Lee asserts.
“They say that the nutrients will settle down after the trees are cut, but then they fell it all again in 15 years,” he says.
“It does untold damage.”
Three years ago, Mr Lee says, he received assurances from Coillte representatives that riparian buffer zones of native deciduous trees such as alder would be created following the latest round of felling, as has been the practice in other forestry locations, but this didn’t take place at Glenanaar: New stands of Sitka spruce were planted.
Coillte says their activities are subject to licence by the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine and that this involves robust ecological assessments, including potential impacts on water quality.
A beekeeper and angler, Mr Lee was director of umbrella environmental group the Sustainable Water Network (Swan) for many years, and has been fighting for water quality in the Blackwater catchment area for even longer.
In recent years, however, he has become increasingly disillusioned with the lack of progress that is being made in protecting and improving Irish water quality.
“I’m frustrated with it, because we’re getting nowhere,” he says.
That may seem like a defeatist approach, but in the 24 years since the EU introduced a new law called the Water Framework Directive, designed to reverse the destruction of water bodies throughout its member states, Irish water quality has worsened significantly, not least in Mr Lee’s Munster Blackwater catchment.
The Water Framework Directive requires EU states to draw up river basin management plans to improve water quality.
These plans come with an inbuilt countdown clock: After three river basin management cycles, by 2027, all EU water bodies must achieve “good” water quality, on a five-point scale of high, good, moderate, poor, and bad.
But the rivers of the Blackwater catchment, as with many others of Ireland’s 46 catchments, were actually closer to achieving the Water Framework Directive goal 14 years ago than they are today.
Some 85% of the Blackwater’s 158 river water bodies were classed as ‘high’ or ‘good’ status between 2007-2009, according to the EPA.
This dropped to 67% as ‘high’ or ‘good’ in the EPA’s latest water quality report from 2016-2021.
The number of pristine, high-quality rivers in the Blackwater catchment has halved in the same time period, from 24 in 2007-2009, to 12 in 2016-2021.
In the meantime, Ireland is dragging its heels on publishing the third river basin management plan that the EU Water Framework Directive requires.
Ireland’s final river basin management plan for 2022-2027 is still only in its draft phase, in 2024.
Only four other EU member states are yet to report their River Basin Management Plan to the EU: Greece, Spain, Portugal, and Bulgaria.
Mr Lee believes that the net result will be EU prosecutions and fines for Ireland when it fails to uphold the targets of the Water Framework Directive.
The European Commission has already said that it is not willing to compromise on those targets, or grant an extension to the 2027 deadline.
There’s already a good indication that the European Commission is prepared to get tough on Ireland when it comes to water quality: In 2023, the commission referred Ireland to the European Court of Justice for not transposing the Water Framework Directive properly into Irish law.
“Over 20 years after the entry into force of this directive, Ireland’s transposing law still needs to provide for appropriate controls in the following areas: Water abstraction, impoundment and activities causing hydro-morphological changes such as dams, weirs and other interferences in natural water flow,” the EU Commission stated.
For Mr Lee, weary from decades of public meetings, initiatives that show promise and then peter out, and engaging with a range of State bodies and NGOs, cynicism is rife.
He is damning in his appraisal of what he sees as the political short-termism that, despite so many good people’s hard work, is resulting in a failure to create a coherent improvement for our rivers.
Before this year’s local elections, Mr Lee took to asking candidates what their stance was on the Water Framework Directive. Some had never heard of it.
“They’re all interested in getting a medical card for Johnny, getting social welfare for some other fella, getting a house for someone else,” he says.
“What can they get for the local community? Oh, a bit of funding. The river never comes into it.”
A political term may be just four years, but a freshwater pearl mussel lives for 140 years: Long after the Water Framework Directive deadline passes, the Blackwater will flow on, in whatever state we leave it in, Mr Lee points out.
“I started doing all this because I was a fisherman, and I wanted there to be trout in the river for generations to come.”
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