River campaigner, Feargal Sharkey, speaks on the ecological collapse of the River Wye outside Cardiff’s Civil Justice Centre.
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00:00 So what was that I can't hear you?
00:03 Please can you introduce yourself?
00:04 Oh my name is Fergal Sharkey.
00:06 I made a few records.
00:08 I go fishing and that's why I'm here.
00:12 I wanted to go fishing and I realised that I couldn't
00:15 because the river I was looking at was on the verge of dying.
00:19 That made me curious as to why it was dying.
00:23 That gave me an itch.
00:25 Foolishly, stupidly, naively I scratched that itch.
00:29 Four years later I've now realised that every time I scratch that itch
00:34 I just end up with a bigger itch.
00:36 And why are we here today?
00:38 Quite simply to call the whole system of regulation
00:42 and environmental protection and conservation into question.
00:46 We have laws in this country, some of them are really robust
00:50 and the River Wye is the perfect example.
00:53 It is one of, if not the most legally, heavily protected river
00:57 in the whole of Western Europe under international law
01:00 and yet it is dying a slow, agonising death.
01:04 And the very government agency set up to protect it, to enforce that law
01:09 in our opinion has been acting unlawfully by not enforcing
01:14 and bringing to bear the full weight of the law as is its job.
01:18 So we're asking the court to agree with that conclusion
01:22 and to order the agency to go and do the very thing it was set up to do
01:26 protect our rivers.