Josepha Madigan (Dublin Rathdown, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Some of the Deputies who contributed have left. As such, I will not address their comments but will respond to some of the points raised by Deputies Burton and Eamon Ryan. I thank Deputy Burton for acknowledging that we are doing something of value and for elevating the debate from the local and projecting it to the global. I accept what she said about the elephants in Tanzania and the Serengeti, although I have not been there myself. I am loath to criticise, but recent decisions in countries such as Botswana to lift the ban on hunting are regrettable. There is undoubtedly an interconnected global web of life and the destruction of any part of it has wide-ranging consequences.

I need to correct the record from last evening. I decry absolutely the fires in Killarney, but it was 175 acres not thousands of acres that were burned. I thank the National Parks and Wildlife Service teams, including Seamus Hassett, Peter O'Toole and their colleagues, for their Herculean efforts to put those fires out.

Deputy Burton mentioned Portrane but that matter is one for the Minister for Housing, Planning and Local Government, Deputy Eoghan Murphy, and Fingal County Council. The primary challenge at Portrane was to save the beach. The "SeaBees" are being put in place with the approval of the National Parks and Wildlife Service.

Deputy Burton also referred to biodiversity plans. We have biodiversity plans for Dublin city and Fingal while Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council is reviewing its plan. Funding for biodiversity can be used by local authorities to draw up further plans. The Deputy might have noticed after the inaugural biodiversity conference that one of the 40 seeds was a commitment to double funding for local authorities by 2021. That funding stands at €500,000 and we hope to increase it to €1 million.

Deputy Eamon Ryan is right that it is about soils and subsoils, what grows and the structural integrity of soil. As an aside, I note that the Deputy's story of his boyhood was evocative. He could be a wonderful poet, or perhaps he is already, like Hopkins, whose poetry I admire. I hope we put the fish back. Our native woodlands initiative is a good start. I am engaged with my colleague, the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine. Last year, Nephin was incorporated into our national park network. It had been a commercial forest. Coillte has made a further commitment to my Seeds for Nature initiative. We are at an inflexion point and the choice on action is ours to make.

Deputy Eamon Ryan also referred to mushrooms. My Department will engage in discussions with the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine on the next CAP. One area of great interest in that context is how to keep farmers farming while providing for them to maintain some of their land for biodiversity without financial loss. I can agree with the Deputy on the benefits of continuous-cover forestry. The forest service offers substantial incentives for the planting of broadleaf forests with native species. This may be a very important initiative with businesses now offering additional funding to encourage farmers to make this change.

It is clear from the debate on biodiversity and the report under discussion that this is not just a local problem, it is also a global problem. My Department is taking its remit in respect of biodiversity very seriously. As I stated in my opening and closing statements in the debate on the loss of biodiversity and the extinction of species, the Government has made serious progress but it intends to and will do more.

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