Dr. Deirdre Lynn:

There is a lot to unpack there. The pollinator plan the Senator mentioned is an amazing plan. It provides excellent guidelines for different sectoral interests. There has been a keen uptake. There has also been support from some in private industry, such as SuperValu. The pollinator plan was mainly drafted by Professor Jane Stout in Trinity College and the National Biodiversity Data Centre so it is not specifically a Government plan. We sit on the steering committee and support it where we can. It is possibly something we need to think about in the future. I do not want to detract from the plan because it is doing really well. To give credit where credit is due, it has done an excellent job.

On the bottlenecks, the Senator's observations were very interesting, particularly with regard to ecologists and to peatlands. Restoring peatlands is quite complicated. You have to make sure you have a really good rehabilitation and restoration plan. That will involve hydrologists, ecohydrologists and engineers at the very start. We do not have enough ecohydrologists who understand the interplay between elements of the water story, such as groundwater and the movement of water, and the ecology itself well enough to ensure that we are rehabilitating in the proper way. If you gave us hundreds of millions tomorrow to ensure we had really good restoration plans, it could still be quite tricky to scale up. That relates to raised bogs. The situation is even more complex for blanket bogs with regard to their topography and very degraded systems that have been overgrazed for a long time.

There are complicated landowner systems as well. It is complex to tease out and work through and that is what we are trying to do through the EU LIFE programme, Wild Atlantic Nature. There is so much community involvement there, working with partners like Coillte and private investors as well. They are trialling, testing and seeing what works on the ground and how to have that community buy-in, which is very important. We probably have the machinery because there has been so much machinery taking the peat out of the ground that there is probably machinery and contract workers that could help with the restoration. We are at a scientific support bottleneck. Maybe we need to look elsewhere, to other EU countries, to try to bring in the skills we need to support this restoration agenda, particularly for bogs.

On supporting biodiversity and making sure it is also considered to be a common benefit, we are trying to have a biodiversity score and to work on that. I refer to water also because the three are all interlinked. We are working with Intel on a pilot restoration project in the Wicklow uplands. Intel is interested in water and in seeing how much water will be restored if a bog is restored. It is about linking all of those together and making sure that when we report back we can say what sort of emissions have been reduced, how biodiversity has improved and, where relevant, how much water has been stored. Private investors are interested in all of those, for different reasons. They have to make various disclosures under different processes and it is important for them to show what they are doing for biodiversity. We are ensuring that we are trying to develop those scores at the same time.

The questions of sonar and the MPAs are probably outside of my area of expertise. The Convention on Biological Diversity, CBD, is good at producing a lot of guidance and documents and there is a guidance document on underwater noise. A lot of these documents will be taken through in the Convention for the Protection of the Marine Environment of the North-East Atlantic, which is known as the OSPAR Convention, and through EU channels as well. I am sure our colleagues in our marine section are dealing with a lot of that.

The matter of indigenous peoples is an interesting one. From the beginning the CBD has involved the views of the indigenous people in local communities. There is a whole article in the convention dedicated to that and to making sure they are involved in all aspects of decision-making. It will be interesting to see what will be brought up in Nairobi on what has happened in Kenya recently and on how we deal with a lot of those conflicts. I know they are very different situations but even in Ireland landowners need to be respected and we need to be able to talk to them and to explain to them the opportunities that are potentially there for them. Everything has changed, particularly in the potential for carbon farming and the opportunities available to landowners. They are starting to think in a different way and it will be an interesting next ten years in how all of this evolves.