Irish Examiner view: Time to consider a single wildlife agency

Review of NPWS is essential and all groups with a commitment to environmental and conservation wellbeing should contribute to it and thereby add to the momentum it initiates. 

Minister of State for Heritage Malcolm Noonan, right, with Trevor Donnelly and Philip Buckley, NPWS, at Killarney National Park in December. File picture: Valerie O’Sullivan

It would not be surprising if there was a sceptical response to the announcement that there is to be a strategic review of the role the National Parks & Wildlife Service (NPWS) plays in protecting the remnants of our biodiversity and our badly neglected national parks.

That scepticism will spring from the unfortunate reality that reports, reviews, and consultation documents are all too often the place where good ideas are sent to die the slowest deaths. 

It will be driven, too, by those whose commercial ambitions and overreach might attract the attention of a strengthened wildlife watchdog. 

That the review is a Green Party demand for participation in government will fuel that boys-of-the-old-brigade scepticism too — as does nearly any environmental measure driven by that party.

Yet that review must succeed and lead to a new commitment to environmental responsibility. As so many global voices have warned, we are approaching a tipping point. Inaction and scepticism are not options, especially in a country where greenwashing is so easily accepted as reality.

Nevertheless, those stirred by the possibility of the kind of oversight that might challenge the excesses of land misuse, industrial pollution, or local authority failings are not the only ones capable of scepticism. 

It does not require a QAnon-grade belief in conspiracy theories to recognise that NPWS funding was greatly reduced just as unsustainable plans to increase food production by up to 60% came on stream. 

Those plans went ahead despite official warnings that they were incompatible with our legal obligations on climate change. 

In 2020, NPWS’s funding was 70% below what it was before the crisis of 2008. That is a turn-a-blind-eye weakness writ large and must be confronted. 

That the NPWS employs just 250 people, fewer than eight per county, including seasonal staff, confirms that vulnerability contrived or otherwise.

Announcing the review, Minister of State for Heritage Malcolm Noonan pointed out that he had “increased its funding by 80% in Budget 2021, but there is much more to do”. 

There certainly is, as the NPWS’s formal mandate is “to preserve, protect, and present our natural heritage”. 

Welcoming the review, the Irish Wildlife Trust pointed out that “the NPWS has been defunded... and cannot meet even minimum legal requirements. This is a fantastic opportunity to... bring nature back to our lives and our landscapes... ”

That the Government has just approved an immediate ban on licences for new oil or natural gas exploration shows what can be achieved if the will exists to bring real change.

This review is essential and all groups with a commitment to environmental and conservation wellbeing should contribute to it and thereby add to the momentum it initiates. 

It may also be the moment to consider consolidating the myriad agencies with responsibilities in this area.

It is hard not to imagine that if the Environmental Protection Agency, Inland Fisheries Ireland, the NPWS, as well as local authorities staff and gardaí working in this field were united, that a new organisation would build the authority and heft needed to confront the problems, and scepticism, around this life-or-death issue.