DEAR SIR: You are to be commended on your editorial in a recent Irish Farmers Journal. It was so relevant and timely for the times we live in.

On a related issue, last February I attended a protest meeting in Athlone, organised to highlight the plight of all the farms, businesses and homes devastated by flooding. It was indeed a very sad and distressing occasion.

But will, or has, anything been done since, about the shocking and disgraceful neglect of our rivers? Vast sums of money have been spent over the years by officials in offices poring over maps, driving around the country looking at rivers and leaving them so, consultants compiling reports, surveys, all the aspirational CFRAM meetings of recent months.

Recently, the Special Report On Strategic Planning For Flood Management revealed how the high-level inter-departmental group established to oversee spending failed to meet for almost six years.

The ultimate solution to the problem of rivers flooding is arterial drainage, where one would start at the mouth of the river, or at least where the tide doesn’t affect it and deepen and clean back to the source.

Meanwhile, as anyone of normal intelligence and common sense knows, to relieve the flooding all you need is machines on the river banks removing the very many years of silting, bushes, trees and growth of all kinds that hinder the river on its meandering journey to the sea.

To do a proper job of drainage, it is imperative that quangos like the inland fisheries who make drainage work much more expensive and much less effective, be sidelined. They have no concept of the hardship, mental trauma and losses involved for those with houses, businesses and farms that are regularly threatened with flooding. Christ himself said to Peter “forget about the fishing, come with me and save the people!”