Dr. Andy Bleasdale:

The question of the vision for agriculture is a very well posed and one with which we all grapple. As Dr. Lynn said, this is an umbrella policy. It will not deliver the metrics of action in the Burren, Shannon Callows or any of the sites where action is required but, as he said, the change in attitudes in the past four or five years has been incredible. The question for us is how we harvest that goodwill and positivity and work with the farming community and the farming organisations to deliver the ambition they have to maintain their livelihoods in these environments and also for us, as Mr. Ó Donnchú said, to confer value in well-managed land and how do we do that. It is through projects such as the wild Atlantic nature project that actually worked with the farming community in the north west on blanket bog landscapes whereby, through a simple scoring system – under which there is quite complicated science but the front end is quite simple scoring system from zero to 10 - the higher the score the farmer achieves through his or her management of the land, the better the payment he or she receives. If we can confer that value to the land, these communities will speak for us on our behalf.

They will drive an agenda that may be faster than we can support. Working in partnership with the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, and working with our regionally-based staff, farming communities and their representative groups, the ambition can be quickly achieved provided we do it in a way that is sustainable over time. The national biodiversity action plan is never going to provide that level of detail but it should provide that vision, which needs to be supported from the bottom up through action led by local communities.