Ms Shirley Clerkin:

I can speak to the age of a hedgerow first. What we are saying is there is a large resource of hedgerows in Ireland now right across the country. It is a habitat with which everyone is familiar. In some ways, as a result, it is kind of a shifting baseline. We have not really noticed the damage we have done to it. The Monaghan survey carried out last year is an exact replica of a study done in 2010. It uses a template and survey methodology that was agreed by Woodlands of Ireland and the Heritage Council way back between 2010 and 2012. It has been used across 21 counties at this stage but we are the first county to repeat it. We did so because during the consultation for the biodiversity and heritage plan of County Monaghan, we got many submissions about hedgerow quality, quantity and concerns from members of the public. As a result of that intervention by the public, it was entered as an action in our biodiversity and heritage plan. That is why we repeated the study.

The study indicates we clearly have a problem with the removal of hedges. It is quite a high percentage - perhaps 9% - over the past ten years. It also demonstrates that because of overmanagement in some cases and undermanagement in others, the resource has been damaged. Such issues can be addressed, however, and the position I want to emphasise is that older hedges are better. They are longer established and have more species diversity in them. Townland boundaries in particular have more species diversity because they often go right back to Gaelic times and are early medieval boundaries. The enclosure of fields for agriculture thereafter is a little more modern but they are still really important for biodiversity. They have fungal networks under the hedges and retain carbon under and within the hedges when they grow, which is a biomass value.

There is a role for hedges in biodiversity, nutrients, buffering for ditches and water courses, habitats and connectivity in the landscape, particularly now in a time of climate change and more intense weather patterns. They act as flood control and mitigation and allow the landscape to be much more resilient. They are very important. We found 88% of the hedges in Monaghan were "unfavourable" in our survey, with 55% of this due to "gappiness" and 40% due to nutrient enrichment. Approximately 75% of them are affected by poaching and not being fenced properly. Virgin diversity has decreased as well. Many of these factors can be addressed, and that is the point we want to make today. There is a major opportunity for the farming sector to contribute to biodiversity in Ireland very simply by changing the management practices of the hedgerows and having contractors managing them in different ways. Farmers could in some cases put less effort into managing their hedgerows, making them wider and allowing them to be fenced off. Perhaps they could graze them at the end of the summer. There could be a reward scheme for good-quality hedges.

It is advocated in the report and we echo the call for a results-based payments scheme for hedgerows based on the quality of the hedges. That is just as Mr. Sheehan has said. If a hedge is bigger, wider, absorbing more carbon and providing more species and benefits to livestock as shelter, for example, the farmer should get a higher payment. We would really love to see a scheme like that be introduced into Pillar 1 or Pillar 2 of the Common Agricultural Policy.