Dr. Cecil Beamish:

In each individual case, Inland Fisheries Ireland, IFI, has the possibility and the entitlement to submit observations which must be considered in the context of any determinations that are made. It is not that IFI is operating in some completely separate sphere. It is a contributor to the licensing process and it makes its views known and they are considered in the context of those decisions.

Senator Paul Daly asked about 492 determinations made since the beginning of putting in place the new structure for licensing. The Senator quite reasonably asks how long will it take to get the other 600. The target number we are working to go through this year, if everything comes right, is 235. There is a speeding up of the process. The appropriate assessments etc., are beginning to come through. That is what we are working to go through this year. Hopefully, in two to two and a half years, everybody who had ten-year licences which have come up for renewal will have gone through it. It is not likely to continue like that. Once the industry has gone through a licensing round, it will be ten years before the first of those return for a licensing decision. In the meantime, there will be some new applications coming in and those will have to be dealt with in the intervening period.

Senator Daly asked whether aquaculture is static or declining and whether licensing is a determinant of that factor. Licensing is one issue but, as I said, everybody who had a licence is able to continue operating. They have not been stopped from doing the operations that they had been doing prior to the expiry date on the licence. It is like a kind of extension to the licence. They are still subject to the same terms and conditions under which they operated the licence during that continuing period and they are not totally free to do anything. They operate under the same terms and conditions. If they break those terms and conditions, they could fall into a different status and the guarantee is effectively not there. There is ongoing monitoring of aquaculture operations, whether they are in the period originally stated on the licence or in the continuing period.

Deputy Pringle talked about a fisheries division and a conflict of interest. There is no fisheries division. There is a marine side of the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, which contains five different divisions that do distinct things. There is one division, which is under Mr. John Quinlan's leadership, which does aquaculture and foreshore management. The division engages in licensing on the aquaculture and the foreshore. They do not have any developmental role other than the aquaculture and foreshore management role. The main developmental role rests with Bord Iascaigh Mhara, BIM. It is the development agency. It is a statutorily independent agency. The scientific adviser, the Marine Institute, is statutorily independent and gives advice on that basis. In the same way that the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine generally has a developmental policy and a regulatory role, one can say that about a lot of different Departments. The Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine hosts both of those. It does so, on behalf of BIM, in the same way. The reality is that there can be no development without good regulation. These both are intertwined. This is the production of food from clean seas. If the seas are not clean, the food is not clean. If the food is not of a quality, it does not make the markets. It does not survive. The regulatory and the developmental are not two separate arms. In this area of food production, they are heavily interlinked and we do not see them as two completely separate issues.

I addressed earlier the issue of the EIS and who carries out the EIS in the context of Senator Mulherin's comments. The EIS is done but the EIS is subject to assessment then by the statutory consultees, such as the Marine Institute and others.

As for the facts on the bays, there are 21 bays where the appropriate assessment has been done. There are 35 of the Natura 2000 bays where aquaculture is an issue. A larger number - it is a matter for the National Parks and Wildlife Service, NPWS, to give the committee the exact number - are Natura 2000 but do not have any aquaculture in them and, therefore, do not come into play in this.

The Deputy raised, and put down parliamentary questions on, the issue of updating of the data. Most of this data have only been captured in the past couple of years. With a lot of the data - the mapping of the bays, the bathymetry of the bays, the sub-straits that are in those bays on the seabed on which things grow and the communities that are growing on those bays - often one is talking about whether one allows one type of activity to happen on top of something, for example, eelgrass or a reef area. That world will not change with time - not in the human time that we are dealing with. Once we have mapped that, and mapped all the communities producing very detailed maps, we have effectively done a form of planning because we have found out where the areas one is trying to conserve are within the bay, what areas are suitable for aquaculture and what areas are not from an environmental perspective. A lot of this does not need to be updated. Others will need to be updated but that will be done on a rolling basis going forward. The issue now is to get all of the bays to that initial level of appropriate assessment where one has all of the data on the seabed, the communities and everything else and where one has identified all the conservation objectives. One will then know what it is we are conserving in those 35 bays and then one will make judgments with all the technical and scientific advice on which areas of those bays would be suitable for what. That is a form of planning. It is a different form of planning because it is scientifically driven but it is a valid form of determining the suitable areas.

On the wider issue of marine spatial planning, of course, the sea area that Ireland controls is ten times the land area. It is an enormous area. It is much bigger than the foreshore. There is a discussion ongoing in the Government - not in our Department but in another Department - on whether to bring forward marine spatial planning legislation. Such legislation would seek to set out in a more directed way how that whole marine estate might be planned and plan-led. It is, of course, much more complex than terrestrial planning. Everybody is used to and knows land use planning which is a two-dimensional exercise. This is a three-dimensional exercise. One has 200 m of water column, what is on the seabed, what is under the seabed, what is in the water column and who uses the surface of the water. These are all different uses and there is a variety of consenting and international legal authorities that govern that. For example, the Common Fisheries Policy determines what is done with the living marine resources that are in the water column or on the seabed and it determines, through a range of other processes, how they will be managed, which areas will be protected, etc. That is an international process. There is a range of international operators. Ireland is not the biggest player in terms of the impact on those, as Deputy Pringle, from Killybegs, will be aware. Similarly, there are rules about what is done underneath the seabed in terms of extraction of resources, exploration etc. for which there is an entirely different governing framework. There are rules about traffic and transport, who can move across different sea areas and everything back to the by-laws that the local authority will have on the near shore. It is not as straightforward as terrestrial planning and that is why it has taken longer. However, there is an ambition to try to move to a greater degree of marine spatial planning, not only for aquaculture but generally. It will happen over time.

In the meantime, in the Natura 2000 areas where most of the aquaculture is happening, there is a much more detailed framework happening now as to what can be done where without damaging a particular area or interest. We should have brought along some of these maps to show the committee.

The maps show in great detail what is in the various places within the bay, what area must be avoided or have a buffer zone placed around it, what area is safe for bottom mussel farming, oyster or whatever, and that drives the licensing process.