EPA apologises for wrongly naming beaches as contaminated

The Environmental Protection Agency has apologised for incorrectly identifying four beaches in Dublin as being contaminated with salmonella.

Its report, The Quality Of Bathing Water In Ireland, published earlier this week, said tests for salmonella were carried out at 23 bathing sites around the State. Four of these tested positive, it said, and wrongly named these as Dollymount Strand, Portmarnock, Portrane and Sutton, Co Dublin.

The list should have read Merrion Strand, Balbriggan and Loughshinny in Co Dublin and Salthill in Co Galway.

Dr Michael Lehane, senior scientific officer with the EPA, explained the error as an "editing mistake".

"A correction slip was done up and ready to go, but unfortunately it was not sent out with the two advance copies that went to the media," he said.

The four beaches in Dublin, identified in the original report as contaminated with salmonella, were sampled for enteroviruses and found to be free of these. This is the subject of the correction slip. "It is an unfortunate error," said Dr Lehane.

A spokeswoman for the sanitation section of Fingal County Council, which has responsibility for sanitation at Portrane, Portmarnock and Sutton, said it was expecting the EPA to publish a retraction. She said a senior member of the section staff had contacted the EPA.

"The EPA said it would be printing a retraction at least as big as the articles that the mistake appeared in," she said. "So we decided not to take it any further."

The EPA carried out tests on 130 bathing areas around the State, and all but two complied with the minimum EU standards for total coliforms, faecal coliforms, mineral oils, surface active agents and phenols.