Mr. Ian Lumley:

On the issue of the alienation of rural communities, which has happened in the hen harrier areas and with peat cutting restrictions, the answer is to move beyond those individual designations and to think about and come up with initiatives for the wider area that are based on genuine community engagement, co-operation and co-operative structures. A good model, which has already been mentioned by the Heritage Council and is internationally recognised as a success, is the Burrenbeo or BurrenLife scheme, which is in the limestone pavement areas of the Burren that maintain traditional grazing. Were that grazing abandoned, scrub would grow and shadow over the wildflowers that are a unique feature of the Burren. We must remember that Ireland is very much a man-made landscape since human colonisation. There were some centuries after the Ice Age, then we were deeply forested and there were extensive areas of bog. There is hardly any part of the country that has been untouched by man, but we need these structures and initiatives to be ratcheted up on a larger scale.

An Taisce is a consultee on the forestry applications and several come in every week. It is unfortunate that on a piecemeal basis and in relatively small areas of land, we have yet further blocks of conifer plantation, with some tokenistic inclusion of broadleaf species around the edges or a bit of the corner and it is often on land that is unsuitable, such as peatland or land that has species with grassland or is in an area that causes conflict with hen harriers. It would be preferable to move to a vision of having a serious national programme of native woodland restoration. Look at how rich the Irish language is in our placenames. For instance, take the number of places in the country that have the word "doire" in them, reflecting that there was an oak wood in that place. Let us look at the locations that do not conflict with intensive farming or biodiversity where we can have large-scale native woodland restoration. That would have multiple benefits. Those woodlands would be a carbon sink. They would also play a major role in flood attenuation in river catchments and on upland areas because woods have the effect of slowing down high rainfall drainage into rivers.

We are very supportive of park initiatives and of using the canals. We seek potential to follow on from the success of the Mayo and Waterford greenways and using redundant railway lines as recreational routes. An Taisce, in fact, is the owner of the Boyne Navigation, which has been developed as a recreational canal route between Navan and Drogheda. There are conflicts to be addressed also. Many of the members may be aware that issues have arisen on the River Barrow relating to protecting the riverine ecology and plant life of the Barrow against its enhanced use for walking and cycling.

On the GM issue, I am not aware of any recent proposals for testing in Ireland but we should all bear in mind that GM is coming into us in all sorts of indirect ways in soya products, animal feeds and other things. Unless we look at the small print on foodstuff labels, we may not be fully aware of the extent to which-----