As local resident Jamie Power looked through yet another disappointing water quality report for his native Bunmahon, something jumped out at him that he wasn’t expecting. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the fact that pollution levels were still at an unacceptable level, that came as little surprise. He knew that no remedial works had taken place on the clearly identifiable, and long-since identified, source of the pollution.
No, the shock was seeing that agriculture was still being identified as the only likely cause of pollution, despite the years that he and a group of volunteers fighting for the future of this coastal town, had spent highlighting that the primary source of pollution was poorly functioning wastewater treatment plants in the small Waterford village.
Report
The document Power was looking at was the bathing water profile (BWP) for Bunmahon. It is an assessment carried out by the local authority, in this case Waterford County Council. And, despite the fact that inadequate sewage treatment had been identified by local residents as the primary cause of bathing water pollution for years, it was still not listed as a threat in bathing.
Despite all relevant parties including the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Uisce Éireann and Waterford County Council, being repeatedly made aware of the utter inadequacy of the wastewater treatment services by local activists, nothing changed.
In June 2022, a meeting between the Bunmahon residents and representatives of those three State agencies took place. But nothing happened, in terms of action or in terms of a change in the threat assessment.
In March 2022, an EPA site visit attended by representatives of Waterford County Council and Uisce Éireann, took place. It concluded “the Bunmahon septic tanks are providing little treatment to the waste water arising in this agglomeration. An assessment of how these septic tanks can be optimised needs to be undertaken as a priority, by Uisce Éireann. Monitoring of the receiving waters from these discharges, the Mahon river and the Ballyristeen Brook, upstream and downstream is needed”.
The previous year, in July 2021, inadequate sewage treatment in Bunmahon was raised in the Dáil and made headlines in national media. Yet the BWP for Bunmahon still had not recognised sewage as a probable pollution pressure in 2024.
The EPA’s Bathing Water Quality in Ireland report states that “in 2024 urban wastewater related incidents were the most frequently reported cause of beach closures”. So the issues in Bunmahon are not confined to that small seaside village, they are nationwide.
The latest BWP assessment, dated March 2025 now acknowledges that there are “short-term pressures” of a moderate risk, following heavy rainfall, from the three wastewater plants in the village. But for over three years, that profile failed to acknowledge the threat clearly identified by the issues with wastewater.
But was this change because the system of cross-reporting had finally caught up with itself? Or was it that years of incessant pressure from a small group of committed locals had finally forced a reluctant acknowledgement of an obvious truth?
If the answer is the latter, is agriculture having water pollution caused by untreated or semi-treated sewage laid at its door in other parts of the country?
Seepage from the main wastewater plant in Bunmahon can clearly be seen seeping into the River Mahon, less than 100m from the sea, on 27 October 2025.
Mahon catchment
The River Mahon rises in the Comeragh mountains, proceeding quite quickly to the spectacular Mahon Falls, which has an 80-foot drop. The river then makes its way through pastoral farmland, through Kilmacthomas, and down to the sea at Bunmahon. There were four mills on the river, and Flahavan’s Mills in Kilmacthomas continues to mill porridge oatlets for their famous brands to this day.
Just below Kilmacthomas, water is extracted to service a significant proportion of Waterford’s City’s needs.
Always a mixed farming area, the number of dairy cows along the catchment has significantly increased since the abolition of quotas in 2015. Talking to farmers along the river’s course, the extent of investment in nutrient management becomes apparent.
Slurry storage and yard improvements mean slurry can be stored until a better time for application emerges, and low-emission spreading equipment ensures maximum efficiency of application. The river meets the Celtic Sea in the village of Bunmahon. It’s known to surfers as one of Ireland’s best surfing beaches.
While the village only has a permanent population of 240, that more than doubles in the busy tourist season. With day-trippers, it can explode to more than a 1,000 people on sunny summer days. Until recently, Uisce Éireann assessed the population of Bunmahon to be 120-150 people.
That in turn would mean a significant underestimation of the assessed loading on the existing wastewater treatment facilities. Bunmahon is part of the Copper Coast region, an environmentally sensitive UNESCO global geopark.
Luke Casey is one of the farmers living and working along the Bunmahon’s catchment.
Like most livestock farmers, he has invested heavily in nutrient management, be that slurry storage, clean water management, low-emission spreading of slurry, farm roadway upgrades, buffer zones and fencing.
He first became fully aware of the fact that agriculture was being identified as the probable source of pollution in Bunmahon when Jamie Power contacted him earlier this year.
I met Luke and Jamie in Bunmahon to see the situation first-hand earlier this month. The wastewater facilities in Bunmahon don’t seem to have received much investment since the 1960s. Standing on the bank of the Bunmahon river in November day, one can clearly see dirty water emerging from the outflow pipe from the main sewage plant for the west side of the river.
In summer, when the treatment plant is busier and river levels are lower, raw sewage can be seen emerging here, locals say. The other two outflows are harder to see, but again, have been observed discharging sewage in high summer.
“Any farmyard operating to 1960s standards would be shut down, and rightly so,” says Luke Casey. “It’s hard to understand how State agencies can not only fail to invest in outdated wastewater treatment facilities that are an obvious source of pollution, but can also combine to misidentify farming as the probable source of that pollution.”
Other locals highlighted the fact that the local caravan park was found to have an outdated and insufficient wastewater treatment system.
A prohibition notice was served, and a significant new sewage treatment plant was installed, presumably at substantial cost to the park’s owners. It can be clearly seen from the beachhead.
In contrast, one of the publicly-owned treatment plants hit the headlines in 2021 when it emerged that remedial works carried out by Uisce Éireann consisted of an upturned traffic cone in an attempt to trap solids to prevent them being washed out to the River Mahon.
Local farmer Luke Casey and local community activist Jamie Power on the bank of the River Mahon.
Waterford County Council response
A spokesperson for Waterford City and County Council said the council conducted a review of the existing profile in early 2025: “The information that was available to the local authority prompted it to update the risk from urban wastewater.”
The EPA is the regulator for the authorisation of discharges from public wastewater agglomerations, they added.
“When issues are known to Uisce Éireann, and it is a condition of its authorisation, it will contact Waterford City and County Council, along with other agencies.”
EPA
When water quality does not meet bathing water standards, local authorities investigate the source of pollution based on local investigations and their knowledge of local conditions at the time of the incident, an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) spokesperson told the Irish Farmers Journal.
“This includes communications with Uisce Éireann on any known incidents with infrastructure. Bunmahon has met the required standards of ‘sufficient’ or ‘good’ every year over the last five years,” they added.
Solutions
Local activists undertook to find solutions rather than just complain about the unacceptable status quo. A consultancy firm carried out an assessment of what would ensure that wastewater would be clean and safe.
An integrated wetland management system was proposed. It would help in filtering waste from water, but would require a significant tract of land.
A compulsory purchase order process is usually required to in order to secure such land. In this case, however, local farmers were asked if they would be willing to voluntarily commit the necessary land to the project, and full agreement was achieved.
Local TD Marc Ó Cathasaigh raised the issue in the Dáil. At the time he called for progress by 2025. It seemed a modest target, but 2025 is almost behind us, and there has been absolutely no progress.
Unfortunately, none of the efforts of the local community has made any difference in progressing the project. Bunmahon is currently only fourth in line in Co Waterford for remedial works. It could mean another decade of constant pollution from out-of-date sewage treatment facilities. Power believes that valuable time was lost while farming was being blamed for the pollution issues presenting in the beach.
Bunmahon has had its Blue Flag status compromised by pollution. That has had an impact on lifeguard services on the beach. In 2025, a lifeguard was only present for July and August.
Earlier this year, when no lifeguard was in place, there was a serious incident. Had the local surf club not been able to perform a rescue, a life could have been lost.
The Mahon River catchment looking down from the Comeragh Mountains towards Bunmahon.
Questions
The Bunmahon situation raises questions for a number of state institutions.
Is LAWPRO and the EPA comfortable with a reporting system that continues to underestimate a clearly identified pollution threat when assessing bathing water quality? Are the reporting mechanisms looking at threats to drinking water quality and river water quality afflicted by the same weaknesses?Are local authorities around the country properly equipped with the correct information from other agencies when assessing water quality and potential threats? Is Uisce Éireann taking ownership of clearly identified pollution from wastewater treatment plants under their control and alerting all reporting and assessment agencies? Are the cross-reporting mechanisms in need of substantial reform? Is farming being blamed for pollution being caused by wastewater treatment plants? Is all pollution not otherwise attributed assumed to come from agriculture?How many Bunmahons are there, and how much is farming being held responsible for pollution not of its’ making?
As local resident Jamie Power looked through yet another disappointing water quality report for his native Bunmahon, something jumped out at him that he wasn’t expecting. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the fact that pollution levels were still at an unacceptable level, that came as little surprise. He knew that no remedial works had taken place on the clearly identifiable, and long-since identified, source of the pollution.
No, the shock was seeing that agriculture was still being identified as the only likely cause of pollution, despite the years that he and a group of volunteers fighting for the future of this coastal town, had spent highlighting that the primary source of pollution was poorly functioning wastewater treatment plants in the small Waterford village.
Report
The document Power was looking at was the bathing water profile (BWP) for Bunmahon. It is an assessment carried out by the local authority, in this case Waterford County Council. And, despite the fact that inadequate sewage treatment had been identified by local residents as the primary cause of bathing water pollution for years, it was still not listed as a threat in bathing.
Despite all relevant parties including the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Uisce Éireann and Waterford County Council, being repeatedly made aware of the utter inadequacy of the wastewater treatment services by local activists, nothing changed.
In June 2022, a meeting between the Bunmahon residents and representatives of those three State agencies took place. But nothing happened, in terms of action or in terms of a change in the threat assessment.
In March 2022, an EPA site visit attended by representatives of Waterford County Council and Uisce Éireann, took place. It concluded “the Bunmahon septic tanks are providing little treatment to the waste water arising in this agglomeration. An assessment of how these septic tanks can be optimised needs to be undertaken as a priority, by Uisce Éireann. Monitoring of the receiving waters from these discharges, the Mahon river and the Ballyristeen Brook, upstream and downstream is needed”.
The previous year, in July 2021, inadequate sewage treatment in Bunmahon was raised in the Dáil and made headlines in national media. Yet the BWP for Bunmahon still had not recognised sewage as a probable pollution pressure in 2024.
The EPA’s Bathing Water Quality in Ireland report states that “in 2024 urban wastewater related incidents were the most frequently reported cause of beach closures”. So the issues in Bunmahon are not confined to that small seaside village, they are nationwide.
The latest BWP assessment, dated March 2025 now acknowledges that there are “short-term pressures” of a moderate risk, following heavy rainfall, from the three wastewater plants in the village. But for over three years, that profile failed to acknowledge the threat clearly identified by the issues with wastewater.
But was this change because the system of cross-reporting had finally caught up with itself? Or was it that years of incessant pressure from a small group of committed locals had finally forced a reluctant acknowledgement of an obvious truth?
If the answer is the latter, is agriculture having water pollution caused by untreated or semi-treated sewage laid at its door in other parts of the country?
Seepage from the main wastewater plant in Bunmahon can clearly be seen seeping into the River Mahon, less than 100m from the sea, on 27 October 2025.
Mahon catchment
The River Mahon rises in the Comeragh mountains, proceeding quite quickly to the spectacular Mahon Falls, which has an 80-foot drop. The river then makes its way through pastoral farmland, through Kilmacthomas, and down to the sea at Bunmahon. There were four mills on the river, and Flahavan’s Mills in Kilmacthomas continues to mill porridge oatlets for their famous brands to this day.
Just below Kilmacthomas, water is extracted to service a significant proportion of Waterford’s City’s needs.
Always a mixed farming area, the number of dairy cows along the catchment has significantly increased since the abolition of quotas in 2015. Talking to farmers along the river’s course, the extent of investment in nutrient management becomes apparent.
Slurry storage and yard improvements mean slurry can be stored until a better time for application emerges, and low-emission spreading equipment ensures maximum efficiency of application. The river meets the Celtic Sea in the village of Bunmahon. It’s known to surfers as one of Ireland’s best surfing beaches.
While the village only has a permanent population of 240, that more than doubles in the busy tourist season. With day-trippers, it can explode to more than a 1,000 people on sunny summer days. Until recently, Uisce Éireann assessed the population of Bunmahon to be 120-150 people.
That in turn would mean a significant underestimation of the assessed loading on the existing wastewater treatment facilities. Bunmahon is part of the Copper Coast region, an environmentally sensitive UNESCO global geopark.
Luke Casey is one of the farmers living and working along the Bunmahon’s catchment.
Like most livestock farmers, he has invested heavily in nutrient management, be that slurry storage, clean water management, low-emission spreading of slurry, farm roadway upgrades, buffer zones and fencing.
He first became fully aware of the fact that agriculture was being identified as the probable source of pollution in Bunmahon when Jamie Power contacted him earlier this year.
I met Luke and Jamie in Bunmahon to see the situation first-hand earlier this month. The wastewater facilities in Bunmahon don’t seem to have received much investment since the 1960s. Standing on the bank of the Bunmahon river in November day, one can clearly see dirty water emerging from the outflow pipe from the main sewage plant for the west side of the river.
In summer, when the treatment plant is busier and river levels are lower, raw sewage can be seen emerging here, locals say. The other two outflows are harder to see, but again, have been observed discharging sewage in high summer.
“Any farmyard operating to 1960s standards would be shut down, and rightly so,” says Luke Casey. “It’s hard to understand how State agencies can not only fail to invest in outdated wastewater treatment facilities that are an obvious source of pollution, but can also combine to misidentify farming as the probable source of that pollution.”
Other locals highlighted the fact that the local caravan park was found to have an outdated and insufficient wastewater treatment system.
A prohibition notice was served, and a significant new sewage treatment plant was installed, presumably at substantial cost to the park’s owners. It can be clearly seen from the beachhead.
In contrast, one of the publicly-owned treatment plants hit the headlines in 2021 when it emerged that remedial works carried out by Uisce Éireann consisted of an upturned traffic cone in an attempt to trap solids to prevent them being washed out to the River Mahon.
Local farmer Luke Casey and local community activist Jamie Power on the bank of the River Mahon.
Waterford County Council response
A spokesperson for Waterford City and County Council said the council conducted a review of the existing profile in early 2025: “The information that was available to the local authority prompted it to update the risk from urban wastewater.”
The EPA is the regulator for the authorisation of discharges from public wastewater agglomerations, they added.
“When issues are known to Uisce Éireann, and it is a condition of its authorisation, it will contact Waterford City and County Council, along with other agencies.”
EPA
When water quality does not meet bathing water standards, local authorities investigate the source of pollution based on local investigations and their knowledge of local conditions at the time of the incident, an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) spokesperson told the Irish Farmers Journal.
“This includes communications with Uisce Éireann on any known incidents with infrastructure. Bunmahon has met the required standards of ‘sufficient’ or ‘good’ every year over the last five years,” they added.
Solutions
Local activists undertook to find solutions rather than just complain about the unacceptable status quo. A consultancy firm carried out an assessment of what would ensure that wastewater would be clean and safe.
An integrated wetland management system was proposed. It would help in filtering waste from water, but would require a significant tract of land.
A compulsory purchase order process is usually required to in order to secure such land. In this case, however, local farmers were asked if they would be willing to voluntarily commit the necessary land to the project, and full agreement was achieved.
Local TD Marc Ó Cathasaigh raised the issue in the Dáil. At the time he called for progress by 2025. It seemed a modest target, but 2025 is almost behind us, and there has been absolutely no progress.
Unfortunately, none of the efforts of the local community has made any difference in progressing the project. Bunmahon is currently only fourth in line in Co Waterford for remedial works. It could mean another decade of constant pollution from out-of-date sewage treatment facilities. Power believes that valuable time was lost while farming was being blamed for the pollution issues presenting in the beach.
Bunmahon has had its Blue Flag status compromised by pollution. That has had an impact on lifeguard services on the beach. In 2025, a lifeguard was only present for July and August.
Earlier this year, when no lifeguard was in place, there was a serious incident. Had the local surf club not been able to perform a rescue, a life could have been lost.
The Mahon River catchment looking down from the Comeragh Mountains towards Bunmahon.
Questions
The Bunmahon situation raises questions for a number of state institutions.
Is LAWPRO and the EPA comfortable with a reporting system that continues to underestimate a clearly identified pollution threat when assessing bathing water quality? Are the reporting mechanisms looking at threats to drinking water quality and river water quality afflicted by the same weaknesses?Are local authorities around the country properly equipped with the correct information from other agencies when assessing water quality and potential threats? Is Uisce Éireann taking ownership of clearly identified pollution from wastewater treatment plants under their control and alerting all reporting and assessment agencies? Are the cross-reporting mechanisms in need of substantial reform? Is farming being blamed for pollution being caused by wastewater treatment plants? Is all pollution not otherwise attributed assumed to come from agriculture?How many Bunmahons are there, and how much is farming being held responsible for pollution not of its’ making? 
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