Dr. Neil Walker:

I will give an example of it. Galway Harbour needs to expand. The entirety of Galway Bay is a special protection area for birds, including the oil tanks by the way, because there is no way of de-designating that area and that is on reclaimed land. In order for them to be able to expand the port and effectively use up some of the special protected area, they have to undertake to manage a wetland area a few miles down the coast in Oranmore. Effectively, that is a compensatory measure which then enables development to occur even though that development is within a protected area under the Habitats Directive and the Natura directive. If we wanted to compensate for something we were doing to the sea bed ten miles offshore, where would we select another piece of sea bed, and what would we do with it? I cannot get my head round it.

BusinessEurope is an umbrella federation, and IBEC is one of 20-odd national federations affiliated to it. One of the things BusinessEurope is suggesting is that within the scope of the net zero industry Act, where it talks about overriding public interest, if we just have vanilla IROPI, then it might be an impossible task to find compensatory measures. It is suggesting not to have the compensatory measures as mandatory where they are impossible.