Ireland has failed to implement the minimal standards imposed by the EU Habitats Directive over the past two decades, the European Court of Justice has ruled. Fines will follow.
This is a judgment long foretold. The Irish Wildlife Trust rightly describes it as a “damning indictment” of our stewardship of the environment on which, as we too often forget, our whole economy ultimately depends. The fines are the least of our problems, the real penalty is the continually worsening condition of our much-vaunted green island and blue seas.
The details of the case should beggar belief. To give just one example, successive governments had failed to even designate 217 of 423 sites agreed to need protection as special areas of conservation (SACs), though there was a rush to do this in advance of the sentence.
But everyone working for nature conservation and climate stability knew about these failures. They are reported regularly by the very State body that is tasked to implement the directive, the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS). If we treated our built environment the way we treat our natural environment, there would hardly be a passable road in the country.
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The Citizens’ Assembly on Biodiversity Loss shows public awareness rising. However, as the assembly chair told an Oireachtas committee, its report will be “meaningless if it does not deliver real change”.
Despite optimistic claims by the Minister responsible for the NPWS, Malcolm Noonan, and its long-serving director, Niall Ó Donnchú, after the verdict, many experts do not believe that recent NPWS funding and staff increases constitute such change.
There is well-founded scepticism that new projects like re-introducing the osprey, welcome in themselves, are really Potemkin villages, masking the grim realities of ongoing environmental decline. What is needed is systemic change, leadership to engage with the public on what is at stake, coupled with the will to enforce environmental regulation as rigorously as any other law.
