Dr. Ciarán O'Keeffe:

On the importance of the pearl mussel, it goes to the two questions. The issue is that the European courts have repeatedly made judgments in regard to not proceeding with projects that go through or are in SACs or SPAs unless there is no doubt that they will not have impact, regardless of what issue one is trying to protect. Our role there is to advise on whether there is clarity to that extent. A lot of the time we can do that but there are times when we cannot provide that clarity. For example, going back to the Galway bypass, my understanding from talking to Arup and other officials in the past couple of years was that, one way or the other, when they went back and did the further study they realised they would have to go through difficult areas because so much of the traffic was going into the city as opposed to bypassing the city entirely. It was not only an ecological issue in the end. It was actually about where people needed to go.