Mr. Ian Lumley:

I would first like to raise the status of the biodiversity plan. Many organisations and nearly every statutory body including the Heritage Council and the National Parks and Wildlife Service, NPWS, have strategic plans. The NPWS's plan for 2017 to 2021 was subject to a public consultation earlier this year. Worryingly, a number of recommendations and actions in the published draft were watered down from an earlier draft prepared last year, particularly in the area of giving enhanced protection and status to natural heritage areas, most of which are only proposed natural heritage areas under the Wildlife Acts and have no legal status. There was also a watering down in the area of giving active support to threat response plans for endangered species like the curlew.

There is a real worry in that regard and I cannot help but suspect that there is an unwillingness to admit failure. The targets in the two previous plans have clearly failed because the NPWS was not given the resources. That has shown up in the continuing Article 17 reports and the update data which is coming in. Major initiatives are being taken. There is programme running at the moment to halt the decline of the freshwater pearl mussel. We are waiting for data on that to come in. The NPWS is simply not given the resources which it needs.

Major policy decisions at Government level are consistently sector driven. The agricultural targets are very much driven by big agricultural business, such as the targets for increasing dairy production under Food Harvest 2020 and Food Wise 2025. The marine sector's plan, Harnessing our Ocean Wealth, is very much based on exploitative extraction targets. These are then supported by the full weight of industry and by the major lobby groups which represent those industrial sectors. The voice of nature and the status of the NPWS are left very weak. Over the years I have been at many stakeholder consultations. It is very difficult because one often sees that the NPWS is just trying to limit damage, because a target or policy has been adopted which will have the obvious effect of increasing intensification. That is why we need to look way beyond resourcing the NPWS and giving it better status as an independent body on the model of the Environmental Protection Agency, which would be a clear path to follow, and to look at changing the fundamental legal status and strategic objectives of the other State agencies concerned with land and marine management.

We need to look at changing the fundamental legal status and strategic objectives of the other State agencies concerned with land and marine management so that the protection of biodiversity is a core objective that is integrated with all other considerations, as set out in the UN sustainable development goals. If this is not done, we will continue to see species and habitat decline. All of us remember getting our leaving certificate results. The red areas on the results to which I am referring depict the bad results we are achieving in respect of the species and habitats where our actions are failing.

There is a need to reform the Wildlife Acts and the general protection regime. It is disappointing that the only wildlife measure that is going through the Oireachtas at the moment will erode wildlife protection by extending the cutting and burning season. There has been a complete failure to investigate properly the devastating wild fires in places like Gougane Barra in County Cork and the Cloosh Valley in County Galway. These wildlife crimes have had a very damaging effect. Nesting species and invertebrates have been wiped out completely. Much wider damage is being done. Problems like erosion and soil carbon loss are being exacerbated. The pollution of watercourses is affecting fish spawning. The impact of these fires, which are getting worse every year, is disastrous. There is potential for the risk to increase as climate change starts to kick in because we could be facing lower rainfall periods in late spring and early summer. That is going to exacerbate the risk and the potential impact of fires.

The answer to this is to take a new approach. We are already meant to be thinking about river basin catchments and upland areas in an integrated way. The strategic plans for such areas should be based on proper community and landowner co-operation. The benefits of this should be equitably shared in the areas in question and downstream as well. Downstream benefits should include flood relief and attenuation, rather than of the sorts of hard engineering responses to flood relief we are getting in a number of urban areas. Very unrealistic demands to drain the Shannon are in circulation at the moment. A better response would be to look at the Shannon as an overall drainage catchment and to restore traditional flood plains or wet woodlands in a number of less agriculturally productive areas. Such an approach would bring multiple benefits.

We need to reform the way we think about agricultural subsidies and the way we use CAP, which accounts for hundreds of millions of euro. The analysis of the spending under the various rural support schemes over the decades has been very disappointing. There is a need for complete reform. There should be a move towards an area-based, strategic and results-based system that benefits landowners, the wider community, the country as a whole, our nature and our biodiversity.