Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

What is the biodiversity crisis? It is the fact that the existence of life, human life and everything else, is dependent on millions and millions of plant and animal species in a very delicate balance, such that if we wipe out millions of those species we may not exist very soon or may not be able to exist.

This is what is at stake. We need to protect it.

I believe the Government speaks with a forked tongue on these things because it is primarily corporate greed that is destroying biodiversity. Yet, time and again the Government submits to the agenda of corporate capitalist greed. I will give the House an example. In 2011, more than 500 sq. km of sandbanks were designated in this country, and under the EU habitats directives they had to be protected because they are very important places of biodiversity for spawning fish, for birds, for shellfish and so on. More recently, only half of those banks are now designated. With the flick of a pen, half of them were dedesignated. Why? It was because the offshore renewable wind industry, the climate industry, said it wanted to build loads of windmills on the Codling Bank and the Kish Bank in particular. This was even though the habitats directive says that only scientific reasons could lead to a designation or a dedesignation. It was not that, however. It was corporate pressure that led to the dedesignation. As a result, those very finely balanced ecosystems could potentially be destroyed. Consider what the National Parks and Wildlife Service has said over the years. The same point goes for forestry in this country. We talk and talk about forestry but in reality we want to team up with vulture funds to continue to expand a monoculture forestry model that is absolutely devastating biodiversity, water quality, soil quality and so on. We need to stop speaking with a forked tongue and put nature and biodiversity ahead of profit.

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