Laois County Councillors have been told that the laws of the land are preventing Councils from removing silt from rivers.
The recent spell of heavy rain has left large swathes of the county under water.
Mountmellick and Portarlington experienced the worst of the flooding but huge amounts of agricultural land across Laois are also struggling.
At a meeting of the Portlaoise Municipal District this week, a discussion on how the rivers being filled with silt is exacerbating the problem.
It came when Fine Gael Councillor Paddy Buggy put down a motion asking that Uisce Eireann be invited to a meeting to discuss what measures they are taking to improve water quality in rivers.
Director of Services Simon Walton explained that water quality data is a matter of public record but he could invite Uisce Eireann to speak about Laois specifically.
The issue of rivers then came forward with Labour Councillor Marie Tuohy explaining that a relative of hers is experiencing great difficulty.
She said: “He is a farmer in Rosenallis and he estimates that around 30 acres of his land are under water.
“A lot of the problem is that the water can’t travel down the river because of all the debris and silt in the river.
“And there seems to be absolutely nothing that he or anyone else is allowed to do about it.”
The Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management say that dredging rivers ‘has significant negative environmental impacts and is often ineffective at preventing large-scale flooding.
‘It can destabilize river banks, destroy wildlife habitats, and increase flood risk downstream by speeding up water flow, while large floods can still occur regardless of dredging.
‘Many experts now advocate for other flood management strategies that work with nature, such as increasing water retention and slowing runoff in the wider catchment area’.
This is a similar approach that is taken in law, as was outlined to the meeting by Director of Services Simon Walton.
He said: “If I was to send staff out in the morning to dredge rivers, the Council would end up in court.
“This is because we are not facilitated to do those works under the laws of the land.
“And there are other statutory bodies, you know who they are, I’m not going to name them, but they are watching everything that we do to ensure, and rightly so from their perspective, that what we do is in accordance with the laws of the land.
“So if you take it over the last six years when we brought out a very extensive river drainage maintenance programme, in so far as the law allows, the only consent we’ve ever gotten to enter the actual river bed as it were, is in the low water level, which will be sometime between July and September, to remove silt that at that time of the year is above the water line.
“So there are no consents available to local authorities to put a bucket effectively, or a dredger below the water line to remove the silt that many people want to see removed.
“The reason for that is the laws of the land do not facilitate that, having regard to various ecological, environmental, fisheries-related designations that now apply to many of the rivers throughout the county.”
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