Róisín Garvey (Green Party) | Oireachtas source

That was one of the points I was making. When we talk about grants and funding, I believe that the SDGs must be more clearly embedded so that people can see the links. I know that Mr. Mulherin is saying that subtly all the funding is covering the SDGs, but if we want people to clearly understand the SDGs then it might be better to have the sustainable development goals embedded in the wording, whether it is a Tidy Towns grant or a community grant, and that there would be extra marks for ticking the boxes so the more SDGs covered in a project the better. I must be very clear that not everybody reads newsletters.

The Tidy Towns programme is amazing but we still have a lot of Tidy Towns groups that are very happy to have everything very neat and uniform, and there is a fear of biodiversity and a fear of letting things be. I have worked with a lot of them and many have realised that they actually save money and save maintenance in voluntary hours if they do go down the native flowers and native trees path. Maybe there is still a bit more work to be done in that regard. I am aware that overall there are marks for those kinds of things but I would not assume that every Tidy Towns group would get that because we still see many manicured flowers put into neat rows of tens and twenties and they are not even native flowers or perennials. A big thing for me is to get perennials down because then they are down for life. It saves the group having to have loads of volunteers.

It would also be good to see the indicators. Ms Sen spoke of measures to combat poverty, which there before we ever had the sustainable development goals: this whole Department is about getting people out of poverty. I was talking in a broader scale. We have 17 sustainable development goals, but we do have a climate and biodiversity emergency that will affect the most vulnerable in rural communities. We need to put a stronger emphasis on it. I do not believe we can leave it to the local community development committees. I am sorry but I have spoken with some CEOs and when one asks them about biodiversity they say "Oh I hate them dandelions", and that is it. We do want it to be bottom-up, as the Cathaoirleach has said. It must be put into the applications for the funding because a lot of people do care on the ground. There is huge work being done about Japanese knotweed, for example, but I do believe that we need more top-down stuff as well. If the funding is coming from the top we must have a much clearer association whereby the more a project is embracing the sustainable development goals as a community then the better chance it has of winning awards and getting funding. That is of paramount importance.