When it puts its mind to it, the State can execute a plan with razor-sharp intention. Food Harvest 2020 is the proof. One rainy day in July 2010 – the same day Ireland’s credit rating was downgraded by Moody’s – the government announced a huge export-led intensification plan, funded with millions of euro of public money, for the Irish food and agriculture industry. The strategy, led by a 30-person committee (of which just one was an environmentalist), went on to exceed almost every commercial target it set. By 2019, agri-food exports had passed €13 billion, above the €12 billion target set a decade earlier.
The ecological ledger since then – collapsing river quality, ammonia pollution, 90 per cent of protected habitats in unfavourable condition – is, in part, what Ireland’s first national Nature Restoration Plan exists to address.
Last month, the Independent Advisory Committee (IAC) on Nature Restoration handed its recommendations to Minister of State Christopher O’Sullivan. This time, the committee was inclusive – the Irish Farmers’ Association, the Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers’ Association and a fishing representative sat alongside Birdwatch Ireland, ecologists and a former senior official from the European Commission’s nature unit. The key takeaway from their recommendations is simple: the State must provide specific, adequate, ring-fenced funding.
The price tag? €450 –€700 million a year. The State can find this money. (In a single decision in 2024, the Cabinet approved €512 million to cover an overrun on the national children’s hospital – more than the lower end of what the IAC is asking for.) Ireland is currently funding environmental protection on the cheap, spending just 0.9 per cent of GDP on it, less than half the EU average of 2.2 per cent. The European Commission’s impact assessment for Ireland puts the modelled annual cost of meeting the regulatory minimum at €134 million and the annual benefit at €1.9 billion – a return of roughly seven to one. Nature restoration in Ireland isn’t a “nice-to-have” luxury. It is one of the highest-return investments available to the State.
Billions of euro of public money – that’s the cost of doing nothing. A report from the Climate Change Advisory Council and the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council estimates compliance costs of €8 –€26 billion for missing climate and nature targets, and that’s before flood damage, water-treatment costs or productivity losses from species decline.
A fund for nature isn’t a radical ask. Austria legislated one in 2022. Since 2023, Germany has spent €4 billion on its action programme for natural climate protection and announced another €4.7 billion in March. The Netherlands set aside €24.3 billion until 2035 to deal with the environmental consequences of intensive agriculture. Our choice isn’t between a fund and no fund; it’s between a fund designed, led and controlled by the Government, or a fund mandated by a court at a time and scale over which the Government will have no control.
In the Budget 2024, a €3.15 billion Climate and Nature Fund was announced. It didn’t take long before the fund was repurposed in plain sight, allocated under last year’s National Development Plan as €2 billion for the MetroLink, €500 million for climate mitigation and renewables and €500 million for water quality. The nature share? Zero. A proposal that included €630 million for farming and conservation was blocked from reaching Cabinet by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. The IFA’s environment chair, John Murphy, said the diversion of the fund away from nature “has seriously undermined confidence”. On this question, the farm groups and environmental NGOs are on the same side; the Department of Finance, which would do well to acquaint itself with the national security risks posed by ecosystem collapse, is not. Nature restoration is now infrastructure, in the same fiscal sense as a port or a power grid.
Food Harvest 2020 prioritised economic growth but did not embed environmental limits in a meaningful way. The damage to nature wasn’t a side effect; it was the predictable result of a plan that was designed without serious environmental representation. But what Food Harvest 2020 had, that the Nature Restoration Plan does not yet have, was a financing pathway behind every target. Markets, banks, the EU and the State – at all stages, cash was on the table for the expansion actions the farmers and processors had to take.
The State’s job here isn’t to invent a financing pipeline for nature – on that, there’s already one emerging. Peatland Finance Ireland, which is backed by the National Parks and Wildlife Service, the European Investment Bank and University College Dublin, launched a “Peatland Standard” in March that allows restoration projects to sell verified ecosystem-benefit credits. Last year, Meta, Microsoft and Google invested €3 million in restoring 450 hectares of peatland. Rebalance Earth, the UK’s first dedicated natural capital fund manager, aims to deploy £10 billion (€11.6 billion) in nature over the next decade, on the premise that companies will pay recurring fees for ecosystem services and pension funds will earn returns. Nature has the beginnings of a financial pathway; the IAC’s call for up to €700 million a year of public money is what completing it would look like.
O’Sullivan has publicly endorsed a dedicated nature restoration fund. He has begun talks with Coillte and Bord na Móna – between them, in the name of the Irish public, they manage 8 per cent of our land – about transferring portions to the National Parks and Wildlife Service. He wants a fund; the IAC has costed one; farm and environmental organisations are calling for one. The question is whether Taoiseach Micheál Martin and Minister for Public Expenditure Jack Chambers will back the Minister responsible, or whether September 1st will arrive – the deadline for a plan to be submitted to the EU Commission – with the Climate and Nature Fund still allocated to the MetroLink.
Ireland already knows how to deliver an ambitious plan, and it comes down to this: you fund it. A nature restoration plan without money is like a human without a heart. It will never work.
