Clíona Mhic

that can only continue for so long.

You know, with 30% of the remaining stock is all you have to sell.

It's really difficult to keep all the staff employed and continue on with the husbandry that's necessary to raise next year's crop as well.

So it has been a really, really difficult two years.

You know, we've had situations before where we have

you know, fairly major losses from time to time.

But that would happen typically, oh, maybe once every 10 or 15 years if you had, you know, really extraordinary environmental conditions or something like that.

We have no answers at this point.

We've had meetings with, shortly after it happened, we had a meeting with Minister Timmy Dooley and officials from BIM, Marine Institute, Waterford Council, Irish Water, the whole lot.

So there's a very comprehensive suite of testing going on at the moment, mostly by BIM and the Marine Institute.

We have monitors in the water constantly monitoring

temperature, salinity, all these types of things.

But so far there just haven't been any answers and we really are stumped.

And I suppose we've gone, I mean, it's never been a secret, but we've gone kind of more public on this one because what we really want now is the assistance and the help of the general public to be the eyes and ears of the industry and

If they see anything unusual, smell anything unusual, have any cause for concern, to please contact us or contact Waterford Council.

You know, just let it be known if there's an issue that they think might be of relevance.

Yeah, we suspect it's down to some kind of a pollution event.

The mortalities happened over a very brief period of time, basically kind of the first week in August in both years.

So we went on holidays around the 25th of July and came back on the 11th of August to find that the mortalities had already started taking place in a big way and they continued dying for another

kind of fortnight or so after that.