Mr. Fintan Kelly:

On the question of the status of the negotiations, as I said, there is a lack of clarity around exactly what Ireland's position is. The biggest indication we received was at an EU Council meeting on 20 December 2022 at which Ireland made a contribution. While the contribution opened with a welcome for the nature restoration law and identified the lack of clarity around the financing mechanisms, which we agree with, the intervention was quite negative overall. It painted the nature restoration law as overly ambitious and overly onerous.

Through our engagement with colleagues at EU level - our partner networks in the European Environmental Bureau and the BirdLife network - we have heard that Ireland is actually one of the most negative member states when it comes to the peatlands and organic soil targets. This has been very frustrating for us because, as I said, we have engaged with the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, as well as the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage and clearly demonstrated that the national targets are much more ambitious than the nature restoration law targets. From our perspective, Ireland is just shooting itself in the foot by trying to get the EU to accept a lower level of ambition than what we already said we would do. For example, the nature restoration law rewetting target for 2030 for organic soils in agricultural use is 7.5%. The climate action plan 2023 has a target of 24%. The nature restoration law has no mandatory targets for industrial peat sites and no targets for the rewetting of afforested sites. The Climate Change Advisory Council and the EPA both say these are issues we will have to address. We are very frustrated with the lack of clarity from the Government on what the national position is. We are also very frustrated by what we hear about the negative, self-defeating position Ireland is taking in negotiations.