Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

These are things that the national planning framework has to make provision for. In the Bill that is before us, the Minister says that it has to make provision for the conservation of the environment and its amenities, including landscape, ecology and biodiversity, as well as archaeological, architectural and natural heritage. Our amendment proposes to add that we should include landscape features, including hedgerows, but critically it proposes to add that there must be metrics and criteria for evaluating these elements. In other words, it is very easy to pay lip service to the conservation of all these things that we absolutely should be committed to conserving, but how do we evaluate whether we are truly into ensuring the conservation of these things? This amendment tries to tie us into establishing very clear metrics and criteria for assessing the state of biodiversity. How do we evaluate what aspects of our landscape, such as hedgerows or landscape features, that need to be conserved? This is rather than simply putting forward a general aspirational but unspecific commitment to those things. That is essentially what it is trying to do, and I think it is a pretty reasonable thing to suggest.