Dr. Andy Bleasdale:

Mr. Ó Donnchú has said pretty much everything I was going to say but I will summarise from my perspective, which is the same as his but slightly different, as is always the case. I have been working in this space for almost 30 years. I was in a different part of a Department that has since changed its name but I was still in the NPWS. At that time, we worked very much in isolation because there was no coherence or integration across government. In each of the operating periods since then, through the past 30 years or more, there has been a stepwise improvement in ambition across government and the embedding of that biodiversity ambition in other Departments, to the landing point we are at now in this cycle from 2021 to 2027, whereby the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications and the water division of our Department are all equal players that are resourced to deliver our bidoversity ambition. What did not work 30 years ago when the NPWS was a sole trader was the dependence on NPWS to progress the national ambition. That could never work. The siloes that developed have now embedded that ecological expertise in their respective areas and the trick now, under the national restoration plan ambition, is to pull that collective ambition together under one umbrella and work collectively for biodiversity going forward in the next two years. There is real opportunity for that collaborative approach that does not depend on any one sector of the Government but has a collaborative and collective responsibility involving all the relevant players.