Allegations by the IFA that local authorities were blaming farmers for poor water quality when many were failing to meet their own statutory obligations were contradicted by senior civil servants at an Oireachtas committee meeting yesterday.
The Joint Committee on Environment and Local Government was told by the IFA president, Mr John Dillon, that only six out of 36 local authorities had secondary water treatment works or better.
And Mr Dillon said that research carried out for it had shown that 30 local authorities were engaged in discharging effluents with only minimal or no treatment.
During a meeting to discuss the implementation of the EU nitrates directive, he said that the majority of local authorities were not in a position to give a fair assessment of water quality in their areas due to the inadequacy of their sampling regimes and their own performance in waste-water treatment.
"This seriously-flawed information is being used to underpin action to regulate farmers under the nitrates directive," said Mr Dillon, who said the nitrate limit being imposed would severely hit 13,000 of Ireland's most productive dairy farmers.
However, Mr John Sadler, of the Department of the Environment, told the committee that the information being used by IFA was out of date, and the programme being implemented to deal with urban water treatment meant that by the end of next year, Ireland would have exceeded what was required in the EU directive.
Mr Tom O'Mahoney, of the Department of the Environment, said that whether he accepted it or not, the Departments of Environment and Agriculture were in agreement with Mr Dillon that a limit of 170kg/ha of organic nitrogen was too low a limit for Ireland.
"All I can say is that that limit of 170kg is not politically or economically tenable. Ireland is obtaining a derogation for higher levels of fertiliser to be used," he said.
Mr Michael Berkery, general secretary of IFA, complained that the Government was about to submit a Nitrates Action Plan which contradicted the Partnership Agreement when the Government said it would seek a 250kg/ha nitrate limit.
He described as "Orwellian" the conditions which might be imposed on Irish farmers, and there had been suggestions in an internal working document obtained by the IFA that farmers might not be allowed spread slurry at weekends.
He also complained that scientific information being supplied by Teagasc, the agriculture and food development authority, to prepare the action plan was not being made available to IFA.
However Mr O'Mahoney said the working document had no status and there was no question of such restrictions. The action programme would be sent to the farm organisations before being submitted to the EU.
The committee also heard that waste from animals was far more toxic than human waste, and it would take 68 million Irish people to generate the levels produced by animals here annually.