Philip Boucher Hayes

Birdwatch Ireland was very far ahead of the game when 12 years ago they drew up national land use maps of habitats occupied by key bird species.

Una, what happened to that plan?

But because land is an attractive investment option, it means, increasingly does it, that the value of land or the price of land bears absolutely no resemblance to the profits that agriculture can generate off it.

So basically, in cruder terms, you're saying that you were mapping hooper swans breed here and then fly from there to here to feed along this route.

So we shouldn't be building anything along those routes.

And the hope would be that if we had one strategy to try and make all of these individual figures more coherent, that it would smooth out the wrinkles that you're talking about here.

And it was ignored.

Explain something to me, though.

We have special protection areas for birds.

Indeed not.

We have things like what we just heard about there, the breeding waders, EIP, hot zones.

Pat O'Toole, political editor of the Irish Farmers Journal.

Thank you.

Solomon, on this particular occasion, or one of three Solomons, is Government Minister Dara O'Brien.

Is that not enough or do we need a national level plan like yours that joins all of those areas up?

I asked him in November of last year, was he sitting on this land use review or would he publish it?

Well, they're deferring to you when

That was in November.

Yesterday, his department told me that it was being held onto in government for further consideration.

Mary Burke is a professor of geography in Trinity College.