Mr. Niall Ó Donnchú:

It is a strong statement. We are turning the ship. If I was here five years ago, I would have said to the Deputy that we had 423 SACs, only a fraction of which were backed by a statutory instrument, only a fraction of which had site-specific conservation objectives, and that we were very sparse in terms of the conservation measures we needed to put in place. There are three things that must be done with an SAC. It needs to be backed by statute so it has the full force of law. It needs to have site-specific conservation objectives with a qualifying interest on that site: what are the objectives? What are the targets? Third, there must be measures to address the threats and pressures on each of those targets.

I will ask my colleague, Ms Carberry, the director with responsibility for nature conservation, to respond to the Deputy. We have had a number of infringements. We have had an ECJ judgment in respect of those SACs. We are currently working with the European Commission to respond to the piece of work that remains outstanding in that regard.