Trevor Sargent
Ceist:249 Mr. Sargent asked the Minister for Agriculture, Food and Forestry the reason his Department is not following up on its instruction to planning agencies for the rural environment protection scheme to involve the services of an environmental scientist in view of the fact that all Teagasc REP scheme reports and the majority of private agency REP scheme plans do not include wildlife and habitat reports which are required by environmental specialists, and in view of the fact that this is to the detriment of the REP scheme in respect of the chances of renewal of the scheme later by the EU and especially to the detriment of the environment in the degraded commonages of the western uplands, many of them in proposed national heritage areas. [6774/97]