Mr. D?nal McCormack:

I will address a few things. On the biodiversity side, the very last page of the document was designed on purpose. It shows a sunflower I grew in my plot, which has three different types of pollinators on it. I am calling that out as one of the things we included for that purpose. We believe there is a massive biodiversity benefit. It is not just us. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in its report yesterday, called out community gardens as a beneficial action for climate change and everything else.

On planning, I am aware the Oxford urban farming workshop, held at the start of January, had speakers from France who came from a different level with a more top-down approach. As social enterprises, they performed reviews of cities and then went to local authorities to say these were the lands they believed were available for community growing. There are a number of different ways of going about it. What Ms Foreman has described is local authorities generally saying, "Great, off you go". We are aware that the Land Development Agency website has the State land database on it, which has been useful to send to some community groups, where people are able to see what State-owned land is in their local areas, whether it is CIÉ land or anything else.

Ms Foreman has probably covered most of the major issues. We are, however, aware of one thing that came from the group. We had regular meetings with Social Farms and Gardens in Northern Ireland to consider different issues and to explore how we work together. One of the issues that came up in the North and the South was the lack of availability in getting a bank account, which can be a challenge for some community groups. It is worthwhile calling that out as a potential blocker that could be in place.