IFA President to view flooding ‘disaster’ today
The IFA President, Tim Cullinan, will travel to Offaly this morning (Friday) to visit farmers living along the Shannon Callows and view the extent of the devastation caused by the severe summer flooding which has left thousands of acres of land under water.
Mr Cullinan will also take part in a protest which is being organised by the lobby group, Save Our Shannon Organisation (SOSO) on Banagher Bridge at 11am.
Up to 100 Offaly farmers are facing into a winter of severe fodder shortages in the wake of the unprecedented rainfall over the past month which has caused a near total wipe-out of grazing land and halted the cutting of hay and silage.
One of the farmers affected is Alo Kenny, whose farm at Clonmacnoise has been “completely flooded” over the past month. “I have already lost up to 15 acres of grazing land and at least another 50 bales of hay, it’s a total disaster,” he said.
Mr Kenny, like many farmers living along the Shannon Callows, is very angry at what he describes as “the total mismanagement” of the river Shannon, and has called for a single agency to be established to manage the river.
“Farmers living along the callows expect winter flooding, but there is no reason whatsoever for our lands to be flooded in the summer as well if the water flow on the Shannon was managed properly,” he says.
“The river was too high by 18 inches on July 6 and we highlighted this with Waterways Ireland and requested that the sluice gates be opened at Meelick Weir to let off the water, but they were still closed a week later,” says Alo Kenny. Like many of his neighbours, he is adamant that if the gates had been opened earlier there would be very little, if any, flooding of local farmland.
“We have been calling for a single agency to manage the river Shannon for years, and nothing has happened, and I feel we need to have people from a farming background on it who know and understand the issues facing farmers when their lands are flooded,” he says.
This call was strongly echoed this week also by another local farmer and Chair of the Save our Shannon Organisation (SOSO), Michael Silke, who said there is “a real sense of desperation among farmers” living along the Shannon Callows.
Michael, who farms a 125 ha farm on the Offaly/Galway border, estimates that he has lost up to 50 acres of hay due to the incessant rainfall throughout the month of July. “Feelings are running very high at the moment,” he says, “nobody seems to care about the fate of the farming communities living along the callows, we have been abandoned by everybody.”
The Save Our Shannon group (formerly known as the mid-Shannon Flood Relief Group) has repeated a call it has been making for many years for measures to be put in place to manage flooding on the Shannon, chief among them being the creation of a single authority with total control of the management, maintenance and navigation levels on the river.
Offaly IFA Chair Pat Walsh was scathing in his criticism of the “multi-agency approach” of managing the flood risk on the Shannon, which he described this week as “a shambles.”
Having been championing the call for a single agency to manage the river over a period of “at least 15 years” Mr Walsh claimed there are now “so many fingers in the pie that nobody seems to want to take responsibility for anything to do with the Shannon” and farmers living along the callows are “bearing the brunt of this mismanagement.”
“I have asked every Minister that has held the Agriculture portfolio over the past 10 years to put one agency in charge of the Shannon and the request has fallen on deaf ears,” said Pat Walsh, “and it is deeply unfair and very frustrating to see people’s livelihoods being completely destroyed when it could be avoided with proper management.”
The Offaly IFA chairman predicts that winter fodder will come at an “exorbitant price” to farmers if it can be sourced at all, but he feels it will be “very scarce” due to the lack of rainfall in the month of May which is peak growing season.
“We need one single agency to manage the Shannon that is responsible, contactable, and that acts in advance to prevent a situation where farmers can have their livelihoods wiped out overnight” said Pat Walsh “we can no longer tolerate the ridiculous situation we have now where we are making a phonecall here and a phonecall there to one agency after another to see if we can get something done to prevent lands from being flooded.”
In response to a query from the Offaly Independent, the ESB pointed out the sluices at Meelick Weir "are operated by Waterways Ireland" and said they coordinate daily with Waterways Ireland "as to sluice movement" throughout the Shannon "including on the days in question."
In a statement, the Office of Public Works, which has overall responsibility for the management of flood risk on the river Shannon, said summer flooding in the Shannon Callows region is “a real concern when there is heavy summer rainfall” and that possible approaches to provide a long term solution to this issue “are being developed by the Shannon Flood Risk State Agency Co-ordination Working Group.”
The statement added that water levels on the Shannon river are managed “on a day to day basis in accordance with agreed protocols between Waterways Ireland and the ESB” and that there is “daily communication and a coordinated approach between those two bodies in this regard.“
The OPW reiterated that water levels on the Shannon “will continue to be monitored on a daily basis, along with weather forecasts and water level reading instrumentation to make informed decisions around sluice opening and closing procedures, within the agreed protocols.”