Irish Examiner view: We all have a role to play in saving our rivers

There are 46 river catchment areas in this county, comprising of 4,842 water bodies, of which 3,192 are rivers, but since the Environmental Protection Agency started monitoring water quality in the 1980s, many of those have seen startling declines and particularly so in our rivers. Picture: Eddie O'Hare

With nearly half of Ireland’s river bodies showing a “moderate, poor, or bad” ecological status during the 2016-2021 period, and the figure improving to just 45% between 2021 and 2023, there is clearly still a huge amount of work to be done to restore not only water quality in our rivers, but public confidence in it.

The Irish Examiner is this week running a series entitled ‘Save Our Rivers’ because although we as a nation take pride in our environment and the quality of our drinking water, there have been countless examples in recent times where our environment is palpably not clean and our water undrinkable.