Mr. P?draic Fogarty:

I will go back to the habitats directive to make a broader point on monitoring. It has a requirement to monitor the condition of listed habitats every seven years and we get a report on that every seven years from the NPWS. There is no requirement in that directive to monitor individual SACs, so we do not do it. Therefore, we do not know whether our local SAC is meeting its conservation objectives because it is not in the legislation. It would be nice to have it but there is no requirement to. Head 17 says there shall be an assessment report on the performance of MPAs but again the language is such that we do not know what that means. If we want monitoring for individual species or habitats, or monitoring of the condition of individual MPAs, it needs to be in the legislation if it going to happen.