Mr. Pádraic Fogarty:

I thank the Senator for those points. On protected areas, since nature conservation was invented - more or less - in the 1970s, nature reserves and protected areas have been one of the principal tools used. They identify important areas and basically put a ring around them. Unfortunately, that has not worked in Ireland. There are some success stories but the model we have used to identify protected areas and manage them simply has not produced results. In some instances biodiversity is worse inside the reserves than outside them. At the moment about 13% of the land area in Ireland and a little over 2% of the sea is designated. The European Union wants to designate 30% of land and sea by the end of this decade. There is a huge challenge ahead and we are not even getting what we had already committed to right. We have to recognise the mistakes that have been made around nature conservation up to now. Ireland in particular should sign up to protecting 30% of our land by 2030 and strictly protecting 10% of it, which is another goal, but we have to do it differently. We have to use public land to achieve many of these aims. We have to incentivise local communities to create their own nature reserves. We have to recognise that a lot of farmers feel dispossessed by the current system and we have to try to rebuild trust with those farming communities. That will require a lot of hard work and investment, in both human capital and money.