Dr. James Moran:

Many countries around the world are doing certain aspects well but no country is getting this right. We need to look to our own capability. In the Netherlands in particular, I know from when we were in college, we had lectures with Professor Matthijs Schouten, who was influential with regard to peatland restoration across Europe. A country that has lost everything realises what it has lost and then does a lot. We do not want to get to the place the Netherlands is in. It has no pristine waters. Its water quality is abundantly worse than ours. When one gets to that stage, one ultimately has to take urgent action. The Netherlands is now trying to reverse that and there is pushback politically, as can be seen with the Farmer-Citizen Movement. The quantities of food that it can produce in a small area of the world is excellent. It leads on that.

However, this has had serious consequences for environmental quality, which now impact on the whole sustainability of its food model. When I hear environmental commentators suggesting that we should look towards the Netherlands as a model, I hope with all hope that we never get to that situation or have to take that level of action. It is a salutary lesson for us, if we were in the position that we had to take that level of action quickly. The Netherlands spends millions of euro on protecting one raised bog in one part of the country to regulate the water and keep it in. In the 1980s, the Netherlands turned to us to try to get us to protect our raised bogs, with people like Professor Schouten. I think colleagues on the panel are aware of the importance the Dutch people placed on peatlands conservation in Ireland in the 1980s in particular.

On New Zealand, in countries that are doing this well it is the indigenous people within those countries who have pushed this. Costa Rica is a particular example. It has turned deforestation around, through the level of engagement from the country's indigenous people and their cultural respect for nature. That comes through with the Maori in New Zealand as well. We have lost an awful lot of that in an Irish context over the last 800 years. We have lost our Celtic sense of connection with nature. We are not in as bad a place as some of the other countries and I hope we do not have to get there before we realise what we have lost. We should look to ourselves, although we can take a lot of different examples, including planning in Utrecht, national parks, and forest protection in Costa Rica. There are little recipes and parts of the solution in various countries but we should trust in ourselves, knowing our island and our cultural background, that we can plan our way out of this ourselves. We do not need to look to other countries. We can learn lessons from them but we have the wherewithal. We are one of the most highly educated countries in the world thanks to the work on education that has been done in the State over the past 90 or 100 years. We can do things very well when we want to, but we do them atrociously a lot of the time.