Mr. Niall Ó Donnchú:

I thank the Senator very much for those comments. I absolutely agree with him. The first responder to nature is the landowner and farmer. We are very conscious of a proactive and respectful engagement with the farmer and landowner. They have more knowledge than we do of how land performs, what it does and so forth. We have had a hugely significant engagement, for instance, with our Wild Atlantic Nature project, which recently won an EU award. Right down along the western seaboard, this project is looking to engage with farmers in the uplands on farming for and with nature.

There are several very good examples throughout the country, in particular the success of the ACRES scheme with which we are involved, but our own farm plan scheme too. My colleague Dr. Andy Bleasdale will probably speak to that in a moment.

To address the other three points raised by the Senator, regarding education, we get 5.36 million visitors a year to our national parks and nature reserves. Access to those national parks is free. That is a policy that is not going to change. There have been some questions about that in the past but access is free and it will remain free. Many of those visitors are multigenerational families. Very often, it is the first encounter with nature for many of those kids visiting farms. We have active education programmes in most of our national parks, though sadly not all, but every visit is an educational visit. Even if there is not an education team, there are education boards. To give a number of examples, there is a very active education programme in Killarney National Park but also the most contemporary interpretative centre we have done for a national park is at Killarney House, the gateway to that park. A huge number of the exhibits there are utterly interactive, specifically to interest kids. It is fascinating to see the younger generation in particular handle some of the exhibits in there. We do not encourage that in the parks for obvious reasons but it is great to see children out engaging with nature. We have a very good programme in Wicklow as well. Wicklow Mountains National Park gets the largest footfall of any national park which creates other kinds of challenges as the Chair knows.

Nonetheless, that openness mentioned by the Senator is hugely important. We have a fantastic team of education guides in Glenveagh National Park. They may be world-leading in what they do. We have just agreed, for the first time in the history of NPWS, a head of education post which we will look to fill next year to draw those disparate programmes together. In the past, what tended to happen was it tended to grow organically in each of the parks. Each came with a very different accent and was reliant on local enthusiasm. However, that needs to be drawn together. There is some absolutely wonderful work being done at that entry level education. Dr. Bleasdale will speak to the more complex research and scientific work that is being done, which is hugely important in working with the university sector at third level and with second level and so on. However, we are certainly an organisation that encourages that openness and facilitates visits and activities in nature for children and multigenerational families.

On volunteerism, we have a number of programmes working with Volunteer Ireland. I will go back to Killarney National Park because it is quite advanced in this. It has a meitheal operation where local retired people volunteer weekly, if not more often, and help with some rhododendron clearance and keeping the park clean. We have modified that to include foot patrols related to fire vigilance and so on and that is a programme we will grow across the national parks system. As I said in response to Deputy O'Flaherty earlier, we are a rural-based organisation. All of our national parks are rural-based, embedded in community. They need to be part of that community. That pride is evident when visiting Connemara National Park or Mayo and in particular I refer to the work we have done on the Wild Nephin National Park. There is a huge degree of volunteerism there as well. It is just incredible work to see. It is rooted in community and in that partnership and that is hugely important. It is important that the parks and reserves are open and so on.

I will ask my colleagues to come in very briefly on community because there are a number of community initiatives. A number of years ago, before the time of pretty much everyone here with the exception of Dr. Bleasdale, when the first engagement on the raised bogs started, it was a challenging engagement. However, that has moved on, certainly in most raised bogs, to a new arena now in the context of the engagement with the community and the alternative use and value of those bogs in particular. I will ask Ms Carberry to come in on a couple of examples of community engagement.