A month on, the Blackwater in Mallow, Co Cork, looks like any other river, a fast flow of water, tumbling and turning in pools and eddies, creating a chorus of sounds competing with the din of nearby road traffic.
But beneath the surface, a silent killer – colourless and odourless – has turned 40 kms of the river from below Banteer downstream to Killavullen, into a fluvial wasteland. The cause remains unknown. Anglers fear it may take a decade or more to recover.
Along with other environmental interests, they highlight water quality issues persisting for more than a decade with little by way of reprimand and penalty.
And the finger of blame for that failure is being pointed mostly at the Environmental Protection Agency as larger dischargers, notably North Cork Creameries in Mallow and Munster Joinery in Ballydesmond, are licensed by the State body.
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As a former member of its advisory committee (2021-2024), environmental policy specialist Sadhbh O’Neill says she cannot stand over the EPA’s reluctance to take timely prosecutions against companies in breach of their licence conditions.
[ Rules to protect Ireland’s fragile rivers are being repeatedly breachedOpens in new window ]
“Given one licence holder in the Blackwater catchment, North Cork Creameries, has received 125 noncompliance notices, these notices clearly have little weight since the noncompliance persisted for years,” she adds.
Dr Elaine McGoff, head of advocacy with An Taisce, says the fish kill will have impacts well beyond the river.
“This kill will reverberate out through the ecosystem, to the birds, bats, otters and other animals which fed on fish and insects from the river, having a much greater impact than thousands of dead fish,” she says.
Irrespective of who is directly responsible for the fish kill, McGoff says any company found to be polluting in breach of its discharge licence repeatedly “is part of the overall problem”.
North Cork Creameries’ discharge pipe feeds into the river Allow, a tributary of the Blackwater. Initial results after dead fish surfaced revealed ammonia levels from that source exceeding statutory limits; in one instance 52 times above the legal limit. High levels of ammonia often lead to fish kills.
The co-op, however, declared it was “entirely impossible” that it was responsible for the mortalities; a view it stands over. The EPA subsequently said there was no causal link between the creamery’s discharges and ecological damage in the Blackwater.
Since 2012, the co-op’s poor environmental performance has been an issue for Inland Fisheries Ireland (IFI) and Cork Co Council, which brought successful court prosecutions, and was highlighted latterly by the EPA.
In 2017, it began publishing a name-and-shame list of worst performing licence holders by listing “national priority sites” every quarter. North Cork Creameries appeared on the list in 2021 and in subsequent years up to 2024; a total of 12 times. In April this year it was convicted on eight counts for exceeding ammonia and nitrogen levels and fined €11,000 in a case brought by the EPA.
Gairdini, trading as Munster Joinery, appeared on the list during 2022 and 2023 due to problematic “discharges to water”. It has not responded to queries on its current environmental compliance.
Pollution from these and other sources will likely have impacted on the health of the river over multiple years, McGoff says.
Anglers echo many of her concerns. Downstream of Mallow bridge, Mallow Trout Anglers members John Ruby, Shane Cummins and Sean Bowen are meeting Declan Noonan from Lombardstown Anglers Club and Dan Dennehy and Mick Murphy from Kanturk and District Trout Anglers to assess the river. They point to where it turns between trees and is lost to sight, explaining that it was over this 100-metre stretch that they began to realise the extent of the unfolding ecological catastrophe.
“We took out 450 fish in the space of an hour – not all were dead, some were still alive, but you might as well keep them out of the water because they were facing a cruel death,” Cummins says. He says the fish had suffered severe gill damage; “they were basically suffocating. It was a terrible sight.”
The Blackwater is one of Ireland’s finest trout and salmon rivers; its catch records date back 150 years. With more than 200 years of angling experience between them, none of these anglers can remember a fish kill as devastating as this one.
Laboratory analysis has been undertaken to identify residues of chemicals, including heavy metals and pesticides, in brown trout specimens. Screening for ammonium compounds in fish sampled from the Blackwater in August indicated “no link between this substance source and the fish kill”, an IFI spokesman said.
The investigation is “across a wide geographic area along the length of the Blackwater and surrounding tributaries”, North Cork Creameries noted in a statement.
On “unintended noncompliance” by the co-op recently recorded, “there is no possibility that the level of emissions noted in that report could kill fish at any location along the waterway”, it added.
It claimed other licensed sites along relevant waterways “are permitted to emit significantly higher discharges than ourselves across a range of emission constituents”.
The co-op was granted its licence in February 2019. The first and only case taken against it by the EPA was initiated in February 2024.
Asked if the licensing system was sufficiently robust, the EPA said “industrial licences ... contain very strict conditions on how an activity must operate so as to protect the environment from pollution that might otherwise arise. The EPA Act, 1992 specifically prohibits the EPA from granting a licence if emissions from the activity would cause pollution”.
Having seen the EPA response to licence transgressions at close hand, O’Neill questions if it is adequately resourced by the Government and backed by skilled staff and environmental monitoring systems across the State.
“The EPA’s mission requires the agency to be fearless in tackling environmental risks and pollution of all kinds, along with mis- and disinformation, and to advise the Government on the policies and interventions needed to reverse the decline in biodiversity and environmental quality,” she says, “But much of its policy advice is delivered sotto voce or behind closed doors. And the net effect is that the EPA comes across as timid and overly cautious.”
