I congratulate the Minister, her Department and, indeed, all of the artists and designers involved in the new passport design. It is a beautiful document. It clearly shows the importance of nature to the Irish people. Fifteen thousand people were engaged in the process of designing this document. The reality is we as a state have not been kind to many of the species that were illustrated in that new design. Our Atlantic salmon populations have decreased by 90% in the past five decades. One third of our bee populations are facing extinction. Whales, dolphins and our sea birds are still waiting for this Government to bring forward marine protected area legislation. We kill thousands of badgers every year, we hunt our foxes with dogs and we course our hares for sport. It is clear that the illustrations are beautiful but we need to do a lot more for those particular species. I hope that when the Minister, all the other Ministers and all the officials are flying back and forth to Europe over the next six months and are flicking through their passports, they will be reminded of their responsibility to protect nature and the importance of nature to the Irish people, they use this next six months to fight for nature, environmental protection and funding for the nature restoration laws, and they do not allow the continued watering down of environmental protections that we have seen over the past number of months. We need to keep the environment on the agenda. Unfortunately, it has clearly fallen right off it. Even the speeches tonight were a demonstration of that. What we do not want is that the next generation of children will only experience the species that are in that document through the pages of that document. They need to be able to experience them in the wild and that will happen only through an Act of protection that the Minister can afford them.

Sentiment score: 0.15