Wildlife Rehabilitation Support Scheme: Motion
Seanad Éireann — 2026-04-29
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PJ Murphy (FG), Agricultural Panel

I welcome the Minister of State to the Seanad and thank him joining us here for the debate on this motion. As Fine Gael spokesperson for biodiversity and as somebody who has been involved in the rehabilitation and release of injured birds and animals since I was a child, I fully understand the great satisfaction involved in taking in an injured animal; caring for it for days, weeks and sometimes months; and seeing that animal released back into the wild in a healthy state. Unfortunately, I also understand the disappointment whenever one has kept a poor, unfortunate injured creature alive for days and weeks in a box beside the range at home and eventually he goes the wrong way and does not make it back to rehabilitation. However, no more than farming and livestock farming, that is all part of the game when you are working with animals and living creatures.
I very much welcome the contents of what I would describe as a well-considered, well-put-together and detailed motion. I very much welcome the fact that the Government will not be opposing this motion. Human behaviour is continuously encroaching on the habitat of wildlife. Our housing, transport infrastructure, electricity and power generation and in particular, our food production all have massive impacts on the natural world around us. We have a responsibility and a duty of care to the other creatures that inhabit this island and the shores around this island to ensure that our behaviour does not impact too greatly on their lives and that when it does, we do all that we can to ensure that unfortunate injured animals are rehabilitated back to the wild whenever possible.
This motion calls on the Government to establish a multi-annual fund to support the work of wildlife rehabilitation centres and suggests that this funding would come in part from fines imposed for wildlife crime and in part from Exchequer funding. What better use could be made of fines imposed for wildlife crime? However, given the vast amount of work and money needed to run these services, those fines would only make up very small amount of the necessary funding and that Exchequer funding and funding from general taxation would have to make up the vast bulk of the funding required.
Given the fact that Exchequer funding would be needed - and this is touched on in the motion, very importantly so, as are capacity and scope of care - and that if Exchequer funding is to be used, and I wholeheartedly agree that it should be, the scope of care and the scope of responsibility would be very clearly laid out. That is allowed for within the wording of the motion. Species in serious decline must form the focus of any care that is paid for through State funding, not solely the desire to be humane with any creature found injured. We have a great number of species that are not in decline and that are in a healthy state. Spending a lot of Exchequer money on rehabilitating species that are not in decline and do not require that amount of money to be spent on them would not be a wise use of Exchequer funding. However, that can certainly be clarified within any policy document that will go further from this motion.
I am glad to see a paragraph in the motion about the importance of education. These centres of rehabilitation could and must form a very important part of the education of our young people as to how to care for wildlife. If anything we do today does not involve education and does not involve passing on the message of the necessity for us to care for wildlife to the next generation, then to a large extent we fail.
Again, I congratulate the proposers of this motion for a very well put together motion. I am delighted to support it.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-04-29/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:52+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-04-29