Dr. Brendan Dunford:

I agree with much of that. It is a good point that there is an appetite. We had a little project in Clare recently called The Hare's Corner. We made an offer to farmers in County Clare to see who would like to put in a small orchard or pond or woodland on the farm. We were overwhelmed with the response. It was not lucrative, and we were just covering costs. There is a real appetite to engage if we can create opportunities to do so. What worries me is that we have made things so bureaucratic. The language has been so wrong and negative and so penalty oriented, and the voices promoting it have been the wrong voices. We have done just about everything we can to put people off the kind of engagement that we want to persuade people to have. We need to work harder on that and the media have a part to play on that. It seems like the negative voices get heard the most.