A major fish kill on a Cork river at the weekend has left more than 100,000 young trout and salmon parr wiped out after pig slurry entered the Martin and Shournagh rivers.
The incident, one of the most serious in Munster in recent years, occurred on Friday evening at Grenagh village in the Rathduff area. So extensive was the pollution that the water supply to Cork city was threatened at one stage. The ESB had to open sluice gates on the Inniscarra dam, releasing hundreds of thousands of gallons of water to dilute the pollution.
Yesterday evening a spokesman for Cork Corporation said the threat to water supplies had been averted and there was now no need for concern. He added that, in different circumstances, supplies to an estimated 140,000 people would have had to be shut down. The latest fish kill is almost a carbon copy of one three years ago, when farm effluent leaked into the Martin river, then into the Shournagh, and finally into the Lee about three miles below a water treatment plant.
At that time also the ESB responded by allowing hundreds of thousands of gallons of water to escape from the dam in order to lessen the effects of the effluent.
According to Mr Aidan Barry, chief officer of the South Western Regional Fisheries Board, the Martin had begun to recover from the last fish kill. Only three weeks ago tests on the river had shown that fish stocks were growing again.
In the last kill, 10,000 young fish were lost, but this time the incident was far more serious.
Mr Barry said the board had identified the cause of the pollution and a prosecution would follow. He said the maximum fine on indictment was £25,000 or £1,000 on summary conviction.
A person responsible for pollution would also have to bear the cost of managing the rivers and restocking them.
Throughout Friday evening and all day Saturday and yesterday fisheries experts and officers from Cork Corporation's water department co-operated in trying to establish the extent of the damage and the threat to the water supply.
Mr Barry said that while the Martin was not a particularly well-known angling river, it was well used by young anglers and by the Blarney Angling Club in Cork as a fishing amenity. "You can take it that this is an extremely serious incident and that we are treating it extremely seriously," he said.