Dr. Andy Bleasdale:

The Senator raised a really important topic in the context of the farming question and engagement with farmers and landowners. Ireland is somewhat different from other member states in that in other member states, the state may own the land in vast areas. We need to work with the farming community if we are to win hearts and minds and get that delivery regime implemented at farm and field level. Biodiversity conservation is not an academic exercise. We could hear from hundreds of thousands of scientists, but until we engage with those who own and manage the land, that will be an exercise in futility. We need to engage with farmers, the farming organisations, the Department of agriculture and Teagasc to try to go beyond the pilot project phase and have an almost nationwide delivery of schemes that have biodiversity restoration as a focus, again, not at the exclusion of farming but working with farming to tweak the farming regimes and deliver the projects and processes that support biodiversity conservation.

The way to do that is to have them voluntary, incentivise those schemes and have a knowledge transfer. When I talk about education, which the Senator raised, it is a two-way process, that is, it is not all top down but is working with and learning from the farming community.

We have a lot of really good examples in the Burren and elsewhere in the country, including projects such as those Ms Carberry mentioned. We have delivered a very ambitious CAP strategic plan, with ACRES co-operation projects. We have results-based scoring in up to 25% of the area of the country. Ireland is leading the way, but we need to go beyond that to incentivise it and to use the nature restoration regulation being passed not as a negative but as an opportunity to go beyond what we have been doing today, which is showing the way, and get really ambitious. This is a massive opportunity and we will seek to seize it, but only in working in partnership with those who own the land.