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

I will do my best. My Department has done a significant amount of work to maintain departmental leadership in this space. The Deputy referred to electric vehicles. The National Parks and Wildlife Service of the Department has been a leader in deploying electric vehicles through its fleet by piloting the use of commercial electrically operated vans in the Wicklow Mountains and Killarney national parks, with a view to reducing its diesel fleet as resources permit. It installed e-charging points at Glenveagh, Connemara and Wild Nephin Ballycroy national parks in 2018, which was prior to the climate action plan. It has also procured two electric buses to service Glenveagh National Park. The contracts for electric buses, which have been co-funded through my Department and the Department of Rural and Community Development, were signed on 26 May last. These buses are the first of their type to enter into use in the Irish transportation network. The Department has, in fairness, been at the cutting edge of trying to show leadership in using electric vehicles into the future.

I acknowledge the Deputy's thanks with regard to the arts announcement yesterday and I hope we will be able to do more into the future, as the Deputy said. It is certainly a step in the right direction.

I shall now turn to the question on the built and archaeological heritage climate change sectoral adaptation plan, which is extremely detailed and technical. The Deputy emphasised the effects of extreme weather on our built heritage. There will be projected changes to the Irish climate that will have implications for our built and archaeological heritage into the future. These changes may be immediate or cumulative. We have to be prepared to adapt to events that can include warmer, wetter winters with hotter, drier summers. We will have increasingly intense and frequent storms and rising sea levels. We will have coastal erosion, some of which is natural, and we will have increased flooding. The Deputy is correct that we will have to try to mitigate the damage from all of these factors. These climate changes can be expected to give rise to structural damage to monuments and to historical properties. The changes will undermine structures and there will be a loss of ground adjacent to structures. There will be exposure and erosion of archaeological sites, a collapse of unstable masonry elements and an additional slow onset of risks including the loss of historic landscape features and the decay of building fabric caused by increased corrosion of metal elements. A further threat is posed of maladaptation, as mentioned earlier by Deputy Darren O'Rourke, which is the inadvertent loss or damage to heritage structures and sites during adaptation works by others.

We are aware of all the points raised by DeputyÓ Ríordáin. We have the adaptation plan to try to mitigate them. On biodiversity, I have been in this Department for two and a half years and I may not be back there again, but I am glad to say we achieved a lot in biodiversity in the time I was there. I had the inaugural national biodiversity conference with a number of stakeholders. The 40 seeds for nature initiative came from that. I also brought the biodiversity duty to the Cabinet, which puts an onus on public bodies to take biodiversity into account in their planning for the future. We have the national biodiversity action plan up to 2021. The need to bring this forward is mentioned in the new programme for Government. I note that the Irish Wildlife Trust said today in the Irish Examinerthat many of the elements we have put into the programme for Government, especially for biodiversity, are potentially "transformative". I believe they are. The Deputy is right that climate action is something we had to take a grip of. It has probably been ignored to a large extent when there have been many words as opposed to action. The good thing I have noticed in this Department is the constant monitoring and progress reports on the actions that are taken in the climate action plan, which, as the Deputy is aware, will be in the legislation and going back to the original Climate Action and Low Carbon Development Act also.

We have had to step it up and be ambitious. We have allocated approximately €2 million to local authorities for many biodiversity projects that will bring the issue back into communities. We have also funded 56 community biodiversity plans through the Community Foundation for Ireland. All of those elements will help. I also refer the Deputy to the Heritage 2030 plan.

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