Pat O’Brien

If you're talking about a geopark, you're talking about the entire biodiversity of a very large area.

What creates a lot of the landscape are the rivers and streams.

We're blessed here in Uachtarárd because we've got this amazing river called the Óin Riff.

It flows all the way through the village, right before all the houses, and yet there's an incredible living heritage in it.

in that we've got otters here, kingfishers, and, of course, the very valuable pearl mussel.

There's only about 11 good rivers with pearl mussels in the country.

There you go.

You know, it lives to, in some places, 100 years old.

Well, I'm glad you said animal because there's lots of other fungi that are tens of thousands of years old or whatever.

Yeah, it's an incredible creature because it's its resilience, I think, that's the key thing.

A lot of people say, oh, the rivers are polluted and that.

The key to showing whether the river is polluted or not is if the pearl mussels are alive...

And they're 70, 80 years old.

They have withstood all that's gone through that river in that particular time.

Now, they can withstand a pulse of pollution or enrichment going through or oil or something like that they've washed in off the road because they can clam up closed and let it pass.

But the key to showing that the river is healthy today was being able to see them open and filtering water while we were walking along by the river.

We were looking at a few of them.

A fantastic asset.

So much going on around us here.

We were chatting to some people there.