Coomhola Salmon Trust win top award for community water quality work

Published by Ian Carey on February 9, 2017February 9, 2017

February 9th 2017

Coomhola Salmon Trust has won the Community & Council Award 2017 for ‘Most Significant Contribution to Water Quality’.

The award was presented to Mark Boyden and Paul Kearney from the trust at a gala awards ceremony on February 4th.

It recognises the work of the trust and in particular their Streamscapes education and community engagement programme.

The Community and Council Awards presented by IPB Insurance and LAMA highlight and recognise community and councils working together, bringing national recognition to projects and developments that may otherwise go unrecognised.

Town, Burough, City and County councillors nominate projects across 20 categories that demonstrate the work implemented through unique projects that enhance their local area for the good of the community.

The Coomhola Salmon Trust describe the Streamscapes Programme on their website:

“The Salmon is the symbol and proof of wise landscape management, as it depends upon pristine waters and a suite of similarly sensitive lifeforms. In turn, ‘wise landscape management’ depends on peoples’ awareness of the impacts that they might have upon waters & wildlife in their pursuit of livelihood, recreation, and domestic management. Raising awareness is the purpose of environmental education.

“In 1989 good general environmental education programmes weren’t really on the map yet in Ireland…it was in that year that Coomhola Salmon Trust was founded by Paul Kearney and Mark Boyden, based at a small research facility on a tributary of the Coomhola River. Between producing native salmon stocking projects for Irish southwest rivers, helping with the efforts to reintroduce salmon to the great River Rhine, and hosting successful freshwater pearl mussel captive breeding research, the StreamScapes Aquatic & Biodiversity Education Project was conceived to assist with wider efforts to conserve our waters and our wilds.

“2014 marked the 25th Anniversary of these efforts, and in that time thousands of participants have been actively engaged in indelible field experience and compelling lessons which have revealed the bounty of natural wonder about us, and of how we can assist in conserving these wonders!

“StreamScapes has developed an ethos and method which have established the template for Public Engagement on water & wildlife awareness activities in support of European Water Framework Directive and Habitats Directive objectives.”

[x_button shape=”square” size=”regular” float=”none” href=”http://streamscapes.ie/” info=”none” info_place=”top” info_trigger=”hover”]Click here to find out more about the Streamscapes Programme [/x_button]

[x_button shape=”square” size=”regular” float=”none” href=”http://lamaawards.org/” info=”none” info_place=”top” info_trigger=”hover”]Click here to find out more about the Community & Council Awards[/x_button]

Image: Presenter Cllr. Winston J. Bennett from Cavan County Council, Paul Kearney, Cllr. Mags Murray, Mark Boyden.

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