Dr. Eamonn Kelly:

I shall just refer back to Deputy Harrington's comments because they are particularly relevant. Approximately 13 years ago I was in the Civil Service in the United Kingdom doing very similar work. I raise this in the context of the question about how Scotland managed matters effectively while we, under the same legislation, seem to have stumbled. From first-hand experience I can say that the type of products we are generating now were being generated 13 years ago in the United Kingdom. That was after they had collected the necessary data in the middle to late 1990s. Obviously, when the European Commission came calling, the UK was in a better position to make more informed decisions and to apply the regime of appropriate assessment to the decision making process. When Brussels looked around the member states at the time, it found that Ireland was making little headway in applying the appropriate assessment provision to aquaculture licensing. One of the main reasons was that, as Dr. O'Keeffe has said, while we had some data, it was only sufficient for designation purposes and not for spatial management of activities within sites. It is one thing to be able to take a sample at sea and determine that an area is an inlet, bay or estuary or that there is a large reef in a site. That is enough to have a site designated but in order to spatially manage the complexity of activities within a site like Galway Bay, for example, one needs a much greater amount of detail, a lot more samples and a lot more analysis. That was the next step that always needed to be taken and we were somewhat slower in taking it than other member states.