Pat O’Brien

It doesn't happen every year.

And you have to be lucky enough.

And then when they're so small in the gravel, they're very hard to see.

They are endangered worldwide.

The European pearl mussel and Ireland has a responsibility to look after it because we have the strongest population.

I don't know if the ones that were there at the time did, but the population did.

So in the 60s, Border Works at the time came along with their big drills and they even left one drill bit in a hole where it obviously got jammed further down the river, packed the gelignite in, dived for cover, let it off, and then drained that part of the river in inverted commas.

They basically levelled it into a kind of a wide, shallow strip of water so that it would drain away quicker.

We all know now that the secret to a lot of protecting waterways is to ensure that the sponges in the headlands absorb and keep the water as long as possible and allow it to drain down slowly.

But this was just below the village where the village was flooding for a long time.

The area that got blasted and probably a lot of them killed has been repopulated and well established and there's good numbers of them below the town.

All the way from here, well up back towards Lame and that.

There's pockets of them, we hope.

But we need to get that proof.

The Geopark is good for nature.

It's good for communities.

It's trying to pull different strands together.

Ben is a geologist.

I skipped that in college.

I did zoology and botany and learnt about the bugs and all of that.