€550,000 Duncannon water quality scheme to commence
A €550,000 European water quality project is being launched in Duncannon today (Tuesday).
Wexford County Council were awarded €550,000 on foot of an application to the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine under its European Innovation Project for the Duncannon Blue Flag Farming and Community Scheme project, which was one of 12 schemes awarded funding in 2018 under the European Innovation Partnerships (EIP) initiative of Ireland’s Rural Development Programme.
The project is being officially launched by Minister Andrew Doyle, Minister of State for Food, Forestry and Horticulture, at 10:30 a.m. in Duncannon Community Hall, to which the local community and farming community have been invited.
The council will use the funding to employ a full-time assistant agricultural scientist and part-time clerical officer over a three-year period.
Under this initiative Wexford County Council is spearheading a project aimed at improving water quality in the area and in the bathing waters in Duncannon with the intention of getting back its blue flag status.
This involves the cooperation of farmers, scientists, advisors, NGOs, coming together in an operational group to address the issue of water quality in the local area.
The ultimate aim of these Department of Agriculture innovation partnerships is to road-test new ideas and practices which can then be used more widely by farmers and others to improve productivity, enhance resource efficiency and pursue sustainable farming practices, in this case to examine how to ensure agriculture has minimal impact on water quality.
This will involve implementing some innovative practices following on from research carried out by the Teagasc Agricultural Catchments Programme and involves mapping each and every farm and farmyard identifying pollution potential zones ‘PPZ’ and using them as education and engagement tools to show farmers in a simple visual way, the water-quality risks specific to their farms. It will also involve the farmers themselves collaboratively proposing solutions to problems identified on their farms which are workable and which they are happy to implement. These solutions would also be used as the basis for a water-quality focused, results-based, reward scheme which could be used to improve water-quality in particularly sensitive catchments. Included is a mechanism to effectively communicate and share local water-quality results with the local community and the establishing local ‘citizen scientist’ groups whereby local community members monitor the quality of their local streams and develop a pollution alert system.