A recent increase in the budget for the NI Environment Agency (NIEA) will help deliver more prosecutions, Agriculture Minister Andrew Muir has said.

Earlier this month, Minister Muir confirmed that £1.6m of additional funding is being put into NIEA to fund 28 new posts within the agency.

Speaking at Stormont on Tuesday, Minister Muir said it is “extremely resource-intensive” for NIEA to get sufficient evidence to prosecute someone for a pollution incident.

“That is why we need to have resources to do the investigations,” the Alliance MLA said.

“We need to make sure that we have a zero-tolerance approach to pollution and encourage people to report such incidents so we can investigate them,” he added.