I am sharing time with Deputy O'Gorman. I welcome the opportunity to discuss the issue of biodiversity. There are a lot of aspects to it. One that is directly relevant to my own area is the issue of marine protected areas. I have raised this point many times. The Government has failed to adequately protect sensitive marine environments. The EU biodiversity strategy 2030 and the UN biodiversity framework require that 30% of our marine area should be protected. Currently, we are at less than 10%. In the meantime, there is another imperative, namely, the development of offshore wind, which is an absolute priority. There is a need to synchronise these two things in a way that doing one does not undermine the other. This has not happened. The private developers of offshore renewable wind have got to select sites. They have chosen sites that are likely the most ecologically sensitive from a biodiversity point of view, but that are cheaper and more profitable sites for the developers to develop offshore wind. Off the east coast, we have development at very close proximity to the shore, on sandbanks which are ecologically very sensitive as they are the spawning ground for shellfish and many species of fish. They also provide livelihoods for fishers off the east coast. The fishers estimate this involves, directly and indirectly, about 800 jobs. The developers have decided which sites should be selected, rather than us deciding which are the marine areas that need to be protected. This is a problem. Groups like the South East Coastal Protection Alliance say there has been significant damage to the marine environment and marine biodiversity off Arklow from the wind farm off the Arklow bank. Now there has to be decommissioning after 20 years, another important factor. The turbines have to be decommissioned after 20 years and then built again on a bigger scale, when there is already significant evidence of damage to marine biodiversity. Ultimately, this can undermine the climate imperative for which renewable energy is being developed in the first place, namely, to prevent damage to the wider climate, as these environments are particularly important for carbon capture. They are potentially being seriously damaged. The point is that we should have the legislation on marine protected areas, we should have the 30% necessary, and we should ensure that the most ecologically sensitive marine areas are protected before we let developers decide where they want, for profit reasons, to develop the offshore renewable energy which we absolutely need. I note that most of the rest of Europe does not put offshore wind at anything like the proximity being proposed on the east coast. They put it 20 km, 30 km and up to 60 km off the coast in these sensitive areas, not 10 km as is proposed here. We need to understand that biodiversity is critical, as is the protection of sensitive marine protected areas, and it should not be the poor relation when we talk about protecting our environment.

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