Dr. Ciarán O'Keeffe:

I shall start off with the responses and my colleague, Dr. Eamonn Kelly, will join in as well. On the possibility of support for marine-based tourism, I believe there are many possibilities, but our Department does not work in that area. However, there has been substantial support in the past for the whale and dolphin group mentioned. We provided the group with a certain amount of seed funding some years ago and we also provided the group with contracts supporting its scientific work. The Heritage Council, which is funded by our Department, has also provided the group with substantial support over the years.

With regard to the general designations issue, it is correct to say that things did not move as fast here as they did in other countries. There are a number of reasons for that. First, we started off with very little baseline data in comparison with other European countries, which had substantial research institutions working on the basic information and they had that information to hand when the habitats directive was introduced. We did not have the same level of information. The clock was ticking in Europe and designations had to be made within a certain time, yet the collection of the basic information to determine whether the sites are worthy of protection takes significant time.

When it comes to licensing, ideally one would have all the information needed from the first day of the notification, but it was simply not possible, within the resources afforded, to get all of the information. Therefore, we have been working very hard and have been co-funding the work on the data gathering with the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine so that small industries do not have to try to get that information. In many other cases where a developer wants to do a project, he must pay for EIA work. In this case, the State is doing the work in order to enable the licensing process to go ahead.