Brian Leddin (Limerick City, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy Ó Cathasaigh.

First, before I suspend the meeting to bring in the next guests, I thank our three guests who came in this morning to share their expertise with us. For my part, I found it a very educational piece. I expect that colleagues also did. I thank members for their engagement. The questions were very pertinent and got to the challenge that we have. We got the best out of our guests as well. All of this, by the way, is to help us with our report on the Citizens' Assembly on Biodiversity Loss report. What we are trying to do here is to achieve a political consensus around some or all of the recommendations of the citizens' assembly report. A big piece of that is how nature restoration and reversing biodiversity loss is paid for. This session is going to prove invaluable for us in our consideration of the report.

I thank the witnesses most sincerely for coming in this morning and with that, I will suspend the meeting for a few minutes to allow our next guests, namely, the officials from the Department of Finance, to come into the meeting room. I should point out that we had invited officials from the Department of Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform. However, they refused our invitation and stated that it is the responsibility of individual line Departments to develop policy in their own areas of responsibility and to implement this policy within the resources approved by the Dáil. In that context, given the subject matter of the meeting, it is directly related to the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage.

They felt it was more appropriate for officials from that Department to attend to discuss the matter and inform the deliberations of the committee.

I would just say to colleagues that we will discuss this correspondence in our private session later this afternoon. I know colleagues will have important views on that particular correspondence. I will suspend to allow the Department of Finance officials to take their seats.