Noel Coonan (Tipperary North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The Minister mentioned my constituency, which is Tipperary. Earlier he spoke about alien invasive species. We have an example on Lough Derg where the zebra mussel came in. While the various European directives and proposals are laudable in one sense, action on the ground to deal with them seems to be very scarce. There does not seem to be any concrete proposal to address it and it has gone on and on. The only proposal that is coming forward is seemingly to take them up to Dublin in the water. Perhaps the people in Dublin might not like the water if they were aware of this invasive species that inhabits Lough Derg.

How does the Minister propose to deal with overlapping between Departments? An example is the ash dieback disease. One would expect it to be dealt with by the forestry section of the Department of Agriculture, Food and Marine. However, it is airborne and has and we can talk about air quality and the impact that has particularly on rural industries like forestry. Are there proposals to deal with that?