Young students want to breathe new life into "dying river"

"SOME 500,000 people live in the entire Shannon catchment area. At least 100,000 of these derive their drinking water from the river," says Iva Pocock of Greenpeace Ireland. "When we talk about saving the Shannon, we aren't just talking about wildlife," adds Ronan Fox.

Greenpeace Ireland has just completed a two week "Celebration Tour", cruising up the entire length of the Shannon on its river boat, the Bradan Feasa, to launch its millennium clean water campaign.

"We want an interdepartmental government task force to work on clean water for the 21st century. We also want to link all the various communities that live on the Shannon, to raise their awareness that unless they work together to protect the river, they will just pass on their problems to each other," says Clare O'Grady Walshe, executive director of Greenpeace Ireland.

In A Vision for the Shannon's Future, Iva Pocock's report for Greenpeace on the Shannon, she states: "The Shannon has become a conduit for society's waste ... the Shannon waters are dying." Blaming a cocktail of factors, including agricultural and industrial waste, forestry run off, sewage, peat and leachate from dumps, she calls for solutions such as a move to organic agriculture, the development of dry toilet technology, a nationwide ban on phosphate based detergents and an insistence on only granting licences to industries if they have an environmental management system based on pollution prevention.

Although pleased with extensive sewage treatment plan for Lough Derg, she believes that we should be thinking further ahead, to less costly techniques such as constructed wetlands, which are only 20 per cent of the price of conventional sewage treatment plants, involve minimal maintenance costs and are ideal for' rural communities with poor soil.

Part of the session for schoolchildren on the Bradan Feasa was an examination of a model of the River Shannon and its tributaries. By pressing certain buttons the youngsters could see in an instant the location of the 18 industry outflows, and the 45 sewage treatment plants (other pipes, which pump out raw sewage, were not marked). They also saw a model of a constructed wetlands system, made by three students from Thurles whose project on this method of sewage treatment (where bacteria in the root systems of bullrushes and iris helps to remove phosphorus from slurry and sewage as it runs through the reed bed) won them two prizes at the Aer Lingus Young Scientist Exhibition.

As such a project testifies, it is young people who seem to have a far greater sensitivity to the damaging effects of the pollution than their parents and grandparents who have allowed it to take place. The schoolchildren visiting the Bradan Feasa in Banagher were very aware of pollution. Four 11 year old girls from St Rynagh's National School were doing a project on recycling. They told me with disgust that there are no recycling bins in Banagher and people are too lazy travel to Birr where facilities are provided.

When a group of teenagers from St Brendan's Community School in Birr was told that phosphorus is a major source of pollution, Brian Bergin (15) said that he would try to convince his mother to buy phosphate free detergents in future.

"I worked in Londis supermarket in Birr last summer, and I know the manager there. I'm going to ask him to stock phosphate free detergents," said Brian. With young people like this around, the future of the Shannon looks a little more rosy.