Cathal Crowe (Clare, Fianna Fail)
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199. To ask the Minister for Housing, Planning, and Local Government the Exchequer funding provided to the National Parks and Wildlife Service to protect biodiversity in 2024 and 2025, in tabular form. [40825/24]

Cathal Crowe (Clare, Fianna Fail)
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200. To ask the Minister for Housing, Planning, and Local Government the annual funding provision his Department provides for acquiring land for biodiversity parks. [40826/24]

Malcolm Noonan (Carlow-Kilkenny, Green Party)
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I propose to take Questions Nos. 199 and 200 together.

The National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) of my Department received €62.25m in capital and current funding from the Exchequer in 2024 to protect biodiversity. I have secured a budget provision of €78.1m in Exchequer funding for 2025. This excludes Shared Island and Just Transition Funding. The entire budget of the NPWS is applied for the purpose of fulfilling its missions which is to Protect Nature. This encompasses a wide range of activity and functions all of which support the overall goal of protecting nature. It is not possible to disaggregate funding or apportion spending to broad terms such as biodiversity.

Land purchases are funded from the capital allocation to the NPWS and will depend in any year on the opportunities that arise for purchase of high nature value lands.