Bluegrass and blue flags are joint preoccupations in Dunmore East, Co Waterford, as the tourist season begins to wind down.
The small fishing village, which has also been a popular holiday resort for over a century, hosts one of only three established annual festivals of bluegrass music in Ireland.
This year's festival, the fourth, runs from tomorrow until Sunday and will at tract hundreds of bluegrass aficionados to the village to enjoy a range of bands from the US, Britain and Ireland.
While the guitar-pickers entertain the crowds, there may be little thought of swimming, but the local authority is continuing to work to resolve the blue-flag issue which has caused considerable annoyance and some inconvenience in the resort this year.
The problem is that one side of Dunmore's fine crescent-shaped strand gained an An Taisce Blue Flag award this year, but the other side did not, having failed on one of 10 criteria applied in tests of bathing-water quality.
Although nominally the beach is divided into two separate strands, Counsellor's Strand and Lawlor's Strand, the dividing feature is simply a short rocky outcrop, and when the tide is out both strands actually become one.
Local tourism interests find it inexplicable that one stretch of sea could be deemed as of excellent quality, while another part of the same water body, only 50 yards away, got the thumbs down. Consequently, at least one local councillor has described the blue flag scheme as a joke.
However, the county council is working on what appears to be the source of the problem, a small stream which flows into the sea over Lawlor's Strand. The stream has been intensively investigated by council staff in recent months, since it came under suspicion as the possible source of a severe E.coli infection contracted by a two-year-old local girl earlier this summer.
The abnormally high summer rainfall this year is thought to have resulted in a high volume of land run-off, entering watercourses and carrying a high pollution load. Similarly, August last year, when the sea-sampling tests were taken, was the wettest on record in the south-east, with Waterford experiencing more than three times the normal rainfall.
Following the single incident of illness, the South-Eastern Health Board insisted on a warning notice advising parents not to allow their children to play in the stream, and the county council took swift action.
"While it's not certain that the stream caused it, we couldn't take a chance," says environmental engineer Mr Eamonn Mansfield. "We have since pinpointed the areas that might be contributing to the problem, and we've been in touch with land-owners and householders who might be contributing to it."
The council has set up a system of chlorinating the suspect stream and is confident, from its own water monitoring, that everything is fine. The question remains, however, whether this year's water-monitoring for next year's blue flag awards will have been affected.
The issue is one which has implications for many coastal areas where streams and rivers feeding on to bathing beaches come from agricultural areas inland or pass through housing areas with inadequate sanitation systems.
"Practically every strand in the country has some kind of stream running into it," Mr Mansfield says. Especially in summers of high rainfall and heavy runoff, councils depend on the co-operation of land-owners to keep animals out of waterways and to maintain sewage systems in good repair.
Waterford County Council has stressed that, in spite of the need to take sensible precautions with regard to the feeder streams, bathing at Dunmore's two beaches and at other strands in the county is completely safe.
The county already has three blue flag-winning beaches. The Tidy Towns winner and heritage village of Ardmore, in the west of the county, failed to win a flag this year due to inferior water quality, but the council has already submitted a preliminary report to the Department of the Environment on a proposed new sewage treatment plant there.