Recently, I attended a meeting of the newly formed Erne Catchment area. This is what I learned.
Some 280,000 tonnes of untreated waste are discharged into Upper and Lower Lough Erne on an annual basis, much of it through unmapped pipe work.
The Lough Erne Trust is not functioning as it should be and this has led to huge frustration amongst groups that use Lough Erne for recreational purposes.
Fermanagh receives proportionally less investment than any other region in the Six Counties, even allowing for population differences.
Several areas of the lough are manifesting particular problems with water quality, with one area of the lower Lough being described by fishermen as ‘Poo Bay’ and swimmers avoiding other areas too.
There is no single agency responsible for water quality in the Erne catchment. Instead there are multiple agencies on both sides of the border that are responsible for certain aspects of its management, but there is little or no co-ordination between these. This is an issue on all river catchments but it causes particular problems where you have the added complication of a catchment that is in two jurisdictions. However, there is surely a precedent in the cross-border management of Lough Foyle and Carlingford Lough for the establishment of an over-arching, single agency approach to river catchment management.
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