I thank the Chair for selecting this matter. The Oireachtas Joint Committee on Public Enterprise and Transport made a recommendation prior to the general election that maintenance should be carried out on the River Shannon. If that took place it would be the first major maintenance carried out on the river since the early 1900s when the country was still under British rule. Since that time Bord na Móna has put silt into the Shannon from its peat extraction, while Coillte has put silt into the river from forestry developments and drainage on land it has planted. Local authorities have silted the Shannon because untreated sewage was and still is going into the river and its tributaries. The Office of Public Works, for which the Minister for Finance has direct responsibility, has put further debris into the Shannon through its arterial drain age programme. Over the last 100 years we have seen continual silting of the Shannon to such an extent that land now exists between Shannonbridge and Meelick which did not exist 40 or 50 years ago. This poses a huge threat to agriculture and tourism.
As everyone is aware, the Shannon is one of the major tourist assets in the country but continual silting threatens the viability of cruisers on the river. There are also thousands of acres in the Shannon basin which are under three to four feet of water due to the lack of release of water and the heavy rainfall of recent weeks.
I seek an allocation of funding to be set aside to carry out annual maintenance of the River Shannon. The Minister will say it is not his Department's responsibility but at the end of the day he is the one with the money and he can call the shots. Funding must be set aside for this and a commitment must be made to allocate that funding on an annual basis; then we can decide who will carry out the work. It is vital that someone takes responsibility for the maintenance and control of the Shannon. At this point 20 different agencies have responsibility for the Shannon in one form or another. The buck must stop with one individual and one Department, but that is not happening at present. The only way it will happen is if the Minister takes the bull by the horns and puts the funding in place. Then we will get this sorted out.