Dr. Deirdre Lynn:

On invasive species, we are going to be introducing new national legislation to implement the new EU regulation. There will be provisions within that legislation for Inland Fisheries Ireland, which will have responsibility for aquatic invasive species.

In response to the Senator's question on the SDGs, there are two main goals that are biodiversity-related, namely, goal 14 on the environment below water and goal 15 on the main biodiversity elements. There is quite a general crossover with everything that we already do in relation to sustainable use and protecting mountain ecosystems. There are also targets relating to ecosystem accounting, and making sure that it is built into our national accounts. It goes back to looking at the value of nature, how we build that into our national accounts and moving on to how we do our cost-benefit analysis and understand those values. There has been some movement on that. The Central Statistics Office, CSO, will report back to EUROSTAT on some of these elements. It will start building up expertise in this area. It is great to see the CSO coming on board.

On the CBD and the public land element, lots of safeguards are built into the convention. We hope that very strong lines will be taken in terms of the protection of indigenous lands to ensure that the international community is not promoting land grabs. The ecosystem approach contains 12 principles. It brings it right back down to the level of the people who were involved with the land at that point. We are doing work in trying to bring in private investors to help support the restoration agenda. We are going to produce a peatland code, which will be a sort of restoration code. We will seek agreement on the code across a lot of different players and stakeholders to ensure that we do not have that slightly sinister move in certain areas towards a land grab. It has not been happening in Ireland. None of the companies that we are dealing with are showing any interest in that vein. They are more keen to support our work. However, I do not know, in that at the beginning, they might be seeing what is happening and how it works, building up to something. We are being very careful in the early phases. The Intel work is being done within our own national park area, supporting that. I did not really understand the Senator's final question on environmental impact assessments and using the tools available.