Marc Ó Cathasaigh (Waterford, Green Party)
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The €237 million is more or less a quarter of a billion euro. I am looking at this from the perspective of fire blight, which is here. We have an issue. It took us too long with ash dieback. We should have been much stricter. I do not know whether we could have prevented it crossing the Irish Sea with weather conditions. That point is moot, but fire blight is a real and present danger. Perhaps it is not a commercial danger in the same way, considering the species it affects, but the wildlife implications and implications on our hedgerows cannot be dismissed or diminished.

Are we adequately controlling the plants that come in and the instances of fire blight that are found in the countryside, in order to try do what we did not manage to do with ash dieback, that is, to prevent the spread of this disease throughout the countryside?