Mr. Pádraic Fogarty:

On the pollution issue, it is the Environmental Protection Agency that tells us that the main sources of pollution in Ireland are agricultural run-off and urban wastewater treatment. Agriculture is the biggest pressure on our water quality. It is also much harder to deal with because is a diffuse source. It is not coming out of a pipe and it runs off land in many different locations.

On the percentage of misconnections, I do not have those figures to hand and have never seen them. We did have an initiative to identify priority areas in need of restoration because we do have a legal obligation to restore water quality across the country. We have not seen much follow through on that in terms of identifying what are the actual sources of pollution within any given catchment, at any one time.

On a biodiversity Act, I would love to see an equivalent to the climate Act that we are about to see this year. We have produced biodiversity action plans since the Rio Earth Summit nearly 30 years ago. We are about to head into our fourth biodiversity action plan and action plans numbers 1, 2 and 3 never really got off the ground so we must look at how we can do things differently. I think that a biodiversity Act would bring up to date an awful lot of our national wildlife legislation, which is showing its age, as well as bring together the European obligations that we have made, and creating lines of responsibility. At the moment, we do not seem to have anybody in particular responsible for implementing the measures that we see in the biodiversity action plan. As I have stated, an awful lot of the time headline Government policy, whether it is on food, in particular, oceans and farmland, are completely at odds with the targets in the biodiversity plan so putting it on a legal footing would be a very significant development.