By Catherine Conlon,Irishexaminer.com

Copyright irishexaminer

Water quality is assessed as “poor”, with no improvement in the condition of rivers or lakes in the past five years.

The stark reality is clear — that while the country has undergone a lot of change and growth in the last 50 years, “this success has been heavily dependent on environmental resources”.

Labour’s environment spokesperson Ciarán Aherne said the EEA report was shocking and painted a grim picture of Ireland’s natural environment where “our model of agriculture and food production is simply environmentally unsustainable in its current form”.

“Our natural environment is in crisis. The Government must step up with urgent, systemic action — not token gestures — to safeguard Ireland’s habitats, species and future generations. We cannot allow short-term politics to destroy our long-term future.”

While successive reports continue to outline clearly the lack of improvement in Ireland’s water quality, Irish policy makers continue to favour business over nature every time.

At the recent National Ploughing Championships, agriculture minister Martin Heydon insisted the nitrates derogation was a top priority for Ireland.

The EU nitrates directive came into force in 1991, in an attempt to protect watercourses from agricultural pollution and to promote good farming practices. A small number of states, including Ireland, applied for derogations to allow some farms to exceed the upper limit, on the basis that the country has a long growing season, its fields can absorb fertilisers, and their use will not put water quality at risk.

Once granted by the commission, Irish farmers apply annually to the Department of Agriculture for a derogation licence, which allows certain farms to exceed the organic nitrogen limit of 170kg per hectare.

“I believe we have a very good chance of holding onto it because of my work and that of colleagues across Government,” Mr Heydon said.

It is clear the nitrates derogation allows farmers to increase productivity and therefore profit margins.

The reality is that farmers depend heavily on imported chemical fertilisers to boost grass growth to feed their grazing animals and spend about €1bn a year on this input.

However, the harsh truth regarding the impact of the derogation on climate, environment and human health are spelt out by environmental activist John Gibbons in his book, The Lie of the Land. Agrifood is the source of almost 38 % of total national greenhouse gas emissions — by far our largest single contributor and the sector most resistant to doing its fair share on emissions reductions, an industry that employs 6.4% of the workforce, accounts for just 6.7% of the gross national income and 9% of exports.

Fertilisers applied to pastures cause nitrates to leach into streams and lakes, where they are toxic to fish and cause algae growth that can severely damage animal and plant life. Eutrophication — or the overloading of a water body with nitrates — can also impact the safety of drinking water.

The EU Court of Auditors noted in 2021 that Ireland is now “among the highest greenhouse gas emitters per hectare” due to the derogation. Nitrogen fertiliser also leads to the release of nitrous oxide and ammonia, gases that account for a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions in Ireland.

Added to the impact of chemical fertilisers is the impact of slurry — 40 million tonnes produced by the national livestock herd a year through its excrement and urine. Slurry use is also regulated by the Nitrates Directive. Gibbons outlines how this is widely ignored.

In terms of human health impacts, Gibbons highlights that in contrast to the stance taken by Ireland to retain its nitrates derogation, Denmark, a country of similar population to Ireland with a large livestock sector, decided to end its exemption in July 2024. Added to that, the Netherlands will scrap its derogation by the end of this year.

These moves follow a 2024 study in Denmark that investigated the health and economic impacts of nitrates. It concluded 127 annual deaths from colorectal cancer were directly attributable to elevated nitrate levels in drinking water, with an annual cost to the state of €310m, in addition to the significant human toll.

“Politicians and sectoral lobbyists demanding the retention of Ireland’s nitrates derogation claim to be defending Irish farming,” writes Gibbons, “yet they are also effectively lobbying for more pollution, less biodiversity and more ill health.”

Increasingly common, climate- fuelled severe weather conditions are adding the water pollution threat. In 2023, a Teagasc expert reported that following an extreme weather event in Wexford, the equivalent of a year’s worth of phosphorous was washed out of a catchment area over just 24 hours.

An EPA study in 2024 on Lady’s Island Lake in Co Wexford, covering 300 hectares, found it to be in an extremely poor ecological condition, probably as a result of “excessive inputs of nitrogen and phosphorous from agriculture”, with restoration efforts expected to cost millions of euros.

More recently, a multi-agency report to investigate a fish kill in the Blackwater River in Cork, that killed at least 32,000 salmon or brown trout in early August, failed to identify the source of the fish kill.

What is known is that around the time of the fish kill, an outflow from Kanturk-based North Cork Creameries (NCC) showed ammonia levels were 52 times the level set in its EPA licence — although the EPA has concluded the creamery was not the source of whatever killed thousands of Blackwater fish.

However, the EPA has warned NNC may lose its licence until it resolves “very serious matters” around wastewater discharges.

Gibbons suggests that contrary to the dominant narrative that Ireland’s largely grass-based livestock systems are inherently or uniquely ‘greener’ than those in other countries, the reality is that Irish agriculture is one of the least climate-efficient in the entire EU.

“Any intelligent and responsible strategy for the future of Irish agriculture has to be rooted in an acceptance that it is senseless to continue with a food production model dominated by meat and dairy,” writes Gibbons.

“Even those who do not accept the moral and economic reasons for this will soon have to bow to the reality that that the Irish agricultural model simply cannot be sustained.”

We can continue to kowtow to the demands of the industrial farming sector who insist that we need the same monocultural livestock-dominated systems that continue to decimate an already wrecked environment.

Or we can set a course for a new Ireland that sets food security and responsibility to nature high on its agenda — a path that will save us years of needless hardship, climate-induced natural and economic disasters and suffering in the decades to come.

Catherine Conlon is a public health doctor in Cork