The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has issued a damning report into the state of the land and water across Ireland and is calling for urgent action.

“Progress, economic prosperity, and health [are] all threatened unless Ireland increases the scale, pace, and ambition of environmental action”, the EPA warns.

There have been huge improvements over the last decades, but now the agency is warning that we should not be complacent. And that there are new pressures on our precious environment like our growing population size.

The latest data estimates 0.1 percent of Ireland’s waterways are seriously polluted.

Sounds promising.

But that statistic hides a falling proportion of rivers judged “high quality”, down from nearly one-third (31.6 percent) in 1973, to just 17.7 percent today.

In other words, whilst our rivers are no longer toxic, fewer of them are in a pristine condition now.

And that’s a pattern repeated across different kind of pollution.

We now send far less rubbish to landfill, but produce more waste than we used to and export a lot of it abroad. Out of sight, out of mind.

The EPA’s Director General, Laura Burke, says “serious action cannot be postponed. We need rapid and resolute advancement in environmental protection.”

EU law has been the driving force for environmental improvements in Ireland, according to the EPA.

“Our membership of the EU has been critically important in safeguarding our environment. Environmental legislation in Ireland, mostly derived from EU law, regulates key dimensions such as waste management, nature protection, chemicals, air quality, the environmental effects of agriculture and industry, and pollution of our waterways. “

“Without this legislation and understanding, there is no question that Ireland’s environment would be substantially more degraded than it currently is.”

But EU law is only supposed to act as a baseline.

The Environmental Protection Agency says now it is time to move to the next level in cleaning up our country.

“EU membership has helped us get to where we now are. But where we now are, while better on some fronts, is nowhere near good enough.

We need to take a major step towards a better environment to secure our future health, wellbeing, and economic prosperity. This is not just about meeting rules and regulations, or just about targets…it is about the most important issue facing the future viability of our society and it demands a transformational leap in our environmental performance for ourselves, for our health and for our economy.”

“We now need a vision for our environment.”