Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Chair and our witnesses for the presentations, which were excellent. The fourth of the citizens' assembly's recommendations reads, "The responsibility for the implementation and enforcement of biodiversity related legislation, directives and policies by all state bodies and agencies must be made clear, with each body/agency held publicly accountable for their performance." Which State bodies need to be held publicly accountable in each of the spheres? As I understand it, the EPA is less the enforcer, although it does oversee the local authorities. It is more involved in the data and stepping back, as it were. Which bodies should we be looking at primarily to step up to the plate and do better? Where, in the view of the EPA, do individual parts of this jigsaw fall short?

The EPA's opening statement says its purpose is "to protect, improve and restore our environment through regulation, scientific knowledge and working with others". It sounds like the agency is a mega-powerful one but, from the questioning, we have already seen that the agency's responsibility falls quite a bit short of prescribing what needs to be done and enforcing its implementation. Compared with other bodies or other countries that have been more successful, have bodies like the EPA become more powerful and been given more invasive powers when it comes to the individual sectors? Perhaps the witnesses might talk about best international practice because we are trying to take what the assembly has said to the next steps.

My final question is for Professor Scott. Reading his presentation, it sounds very much exploratory.

We are at a very early stage in identifying where the conflicts arise and how they might be reconciled. Again, what do successful models in other countries look like, where they are much farther down the road than we are? What do we need to anticipate? At the end of the day, one of the challenges will be, as has been said by members of the assembly, how this requires changes in the habits of a lifetime. It is major transformational rethinking. It would be very useful to get an understanding of what sort of rethinking we need to do, and how other countries who have perhaps gone through it could signpost, even at this relatively early stage, how those conflicting objectives can be reconciled.