I am sure that, like me, the Minister of State has been out knocking on doors in Dublin Central and Galway West over the past number of weeks. One of the things I have been struck with in the many conversations I have had with voters is the deep connection that people in our country feel with nature. This connection applies irrespective of where people live, be it in urban or rural communities. Whether they are planting trees along streets in Stoneybatter or growing on the land area protected by Connemara National Park, people across Ireland want to see action taken to protect the nature around them. Many Irish people are taking this action themselves. We can look at how communities around the country have embraced the all-Ireland pollinator plan. Everywhere we see signs on roadsides and in parks stating areas have been left aside and allowed to go wild. This scheme is very much driven forward by the Tidy Towns groups around the country. The Tidy Towns movement itself has changed and evolved in many ways over recent years. There was once a time when the local clean-up involved a war on weeds but now local Tidy Towns groups are very much making space for nature, wildness and a bit of messiness in towns and villages. Community gardens, local authority allotments, the slow food movement and seed savers are manifestations of communities' desire to get closer to nature. This passion has to be matched with Government action and funding. In 2019, the Dáil declared a biodiversity crisis in Ireland alongside the climate crisis. The Dáil recognised that the two were deeply interlinked. Right now Ireland sits 13th from the bottom of countries worldwide in a biodiversity intactness index. Maybe this is unsurprising when we consider that Ireland spent the lowest share of GDP on nature of all EU member states. My colleague, Senator Noonan, has said a reframe is needed when it comes to nature and that it should be treated as critical infrastructure in its own right. What the Government fails to see is the link between our future financial sustainability and our environmental sustainability. It needs to shift its thinking towards one of investment in flood prevention, resilience in our farming system, community well-being, restoring our rivers, abundant seas and cooling our urban centres. This reframe should mean this and future Governments do not view nature restoration as a financial burden. Since last year, I have raised in the Dáil the status of Lady's Island Lake in Wexford on a number of occasions. Last weekend, members of the Oireachtas climate committee travelled to Wexford to see the condition of the lake. I acknowledged in the Dáil earlier this afternoon that an initial tranche of funding provided has allowed baseline and scoping work to begin there. Lady's Island Lake could become a beacon for nature restoration across this island but it will require the State to step up with more funding and support actions on the ground that will turn the story there around. It is worth reflecting that the biggest potential source of funding for restoring nature, and particularly for paying farmers for actions they agree to undertake on their own land, is gone with the raiding of the Climate and Nature Fund last year by the Government to plug holes in existing infrastructure funding. Hundreds of millions of euro had been put aside in the Climate and Nature Fund, money taken from the annual surpluses that were available to create new revenue streams, particularly for smaller farmers on marginal land. From where will we replace this money that the Government took from the Climate and Nature Fund, which would have financed nature restoration? So much of the rest of what the Minister of State and the Government say about nature protection hangs on this question of where the money will come from. Unfortunately, until the Government can demonstrate a clear funding source for the scale of the nature protection we need to address the interlinked nature and biodiversity crisis, pretty much everything the Government representatives say today will ring hollow.

Sentiment score: 0.05