The Chair of the Citizens' Assembly on Biodiversity Loss has rejected "rhetoric on the urban-rural divide", insisting that most people want effective action to protect the environment.
Dr Aoibhinn Ní Shúilleabháin told the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Environment and Climate Action that research from the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) indicates that "people both young and old and from rural and urban areas are worried about our environment and want more to be done".
While "there were differences of opinion" at meetings of the assembly, she said that members "came to overwhelming majority agreement on nearly all of the recommendations you see before you today".
The final report of the Citizens' Assembly on Biodiversity Loss, published in April, highlighted what it called the failure of the State to adequately fund, implement and enforce existing laws and directives to protect biodiversity and nature.
It recommended a referendum to insert biodiversity and nature protection in the Constitution, and to confer environmental rights on both people and nature.
The assembly's 99 members, along with its chair, were asked last year to assess how the State could improve its response to biodiversity loss.
Two of the members, Anne Jones and Patrick Joyce, also attended today's committee hearing, along with expert witnesses.
"It's great to see the strength with which people are responding to climate change and the Climate Action Plan," Professor Tasman Crowe, Vice President for Sustainability at UCD, said.
"But the same could happen for biodiversity. They can sit on the same kind of footing. In a way it's as important - or more important - to be doing that."
Read more:
Citizens' Assembly urges State to enforce biodiversity laws
Dr Ní Shúilleabháin also told the committee that farmers have assured the assembly that they will "respond to changes in policy, but these need to be meaningful, widely available and of sufficient duration to make it worthwhile to significantly realign their practice."
"Farmers are the custodians of almost 70% of the Irish landscape", she said, urging that they "be included as key actors in discussions required around changes necessary to policy and recognise their key role in solving the problem of biodiversity loss".
Saying that she herself "proudly comes from rural Ireland, a small townland in Co Mayo," Dr Ní Shúilleabháin said that "over 60% of the assembly membership was from rural Ireland".
