Mr. Niall ? Donnch?:

I will start with the Conor Pass and work my way back, if that is okay. Areas of high nature value come on the market quite often. We are always interested in areas of high nature value but we do not do our negotiating in public, no more than we negotiated the purchase of Brú na Bóinne. Suffice to say, we are well aware of the Conor Pass and its nature value. It is designated and we are looking at that, with a number of other opportunities.

Working back through the questions, and the Deputy will stop me if I forget one, I will come back to the first one. Not all fires are set by farmers and not all fires are illegal. There is a burning season and many farmers undertake that burning very responsibly and within the law. The burning season is open right now. There have been pressures in the past to extend that burning season. That has not happened and nor does the NPWS favour any extension of the burning season. We apply a significant amount of resourcing to the monitoring and deterring of illegal fires. This year, for instance, we deployed air cover and drone cover and significant resources on the ground during the orange and red warnings one gets around what is called "wildfire potential". We do not have naturally occurring wildfires but it gets that name. I believe that was a significant deterrent this year, with the eyes in the sky and patrols on the ground, who came upon a number of fires that were being illegally started. There will be prosecutions ensuing from that. I cannot go any further on that because there are active files in that respect.

If I can come back to the wildlife crime unit, everybody in the National Parks and Wildlife Service, from me right across the organisation, is responsible for addressing wildlife crime, in the same way as everybody in An Garda Síochána is. I will not have time here to go into the anatomy of a crime but I would be very happy, on another occasion, to describe how NPWS responds to a report of a wildlife crime, whether it is illegal burning, hedge cutting or hedge destruction out of season, badger baiting or whatever else. We have protocols in place for how the organisation reacts to those reports.

Looking at the metrics this year, we have had a very successful year in terms of the number of prosecutions. However, the number of successful prosecutions is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the activities within NPWS to address wildlife crime. Not all cases come to court. Some are dealt with on the ground, on the spot, by the intervention of our rangers, district conservation staff and so forth. I could give some examples of those. Looking at the hard metrics, we would have a couple of hundred active wildlife crime cases of varying degrees under review at any point in time. Members may have picked up in the media recently that we had some headline wins in the courts.

The courts now recognise that wildlife crime is a crime and needs to be treated and addressed accordingly. That is not me making a statement I should not make about the courts system. It has been a learning process for everyone around the destruction of nature and its wider societal impact, no matter how local it is. We have had 55 successful prosecutions so far this year. Another four are due in court next week. Beneath all of that there are a couple of hundred active files, some of which are dealt with by intervention locally. The intervention is that where something has been destroyed or damaged, the person responsible needs to restore it. That is often a swifter, more exacting response than working through the courts system. We have quite a number of those. I believe I have answered most of the questions.