Dr. Cecil Beamish:

I will try to cover all the questions but members should come back to me if I do not. First of all, I will take Deputy Kenny's point that people are entitled to understand why it is taking so long, and they absolutely are. I tried in my opening statement to explain that the whole issue started and can only be understood in the context of the European Court of Justice judgment, which covers almost all the area. Once the judgment was made, the negotiations, which went on in 2008 and were settled in 2009 with the Commission on what would happen, were crucially important to the industry and those discussions were centred on whether the Commission was going to move to daily fines on the State in which case the Commission would also have potentially moved to require all aquaculture activity in the State to be moved out of the Natura 2000 bays until there was licensing compliance with the directives. A roadmap was agreed with the Commission where a series of steps would be taken that would enable the State to make licence decisions in compliance with birds and habitats directives and there was a provision put into national legislation allowing people to continue their aquaculture activities in those areas under the terms and conditions of the licences they had, pending a decision on renewal. All those who was operating could continue to operate on the terms and conditions of their own licences, pending a renewal. People were not stopped from operating.

Moving on to how one can make licence decisions in compliance, the infrastructure did not exist in the State to do this. It was not a matter of bureaucrats taking their time or something like that. All we had was a red line around the areas that had been mapped by a person in the National Parks & Wildlife Service for Natura 2000 sites. Nobody had done detailed internal mapping of what was in those bays, what was on the seabed, what was growing there, what was to be protected, what was in the intertidal areas and what substrates were. The Department, therefore, commissioned this enormous data collection exercise to map those bays, to map what was on the seabed which had never been done, what was growing on the seabed, what type of substrates there were, whether it is was mud, gravel or whatever, what was in the intertidal areas, where the migrating birds were feeding and so on, and where the cetaceans, the dolphins and so on, were moving. Once that data became available, and it became available sequentially, it could then be analysed and presented to the National Parks & Wildlife Service which identified the scientific interest being protected in the bay and where it was. The Department then had to take all the aquaculture that was in the bay - we are talking about bays that can be 30 to 40 miles long and 20 to 30 miles wide - and map it over the environmental data that was then available, which are called shape piles. Once the National Parks & Wildlife Service had identified the scientific interests to be conserved and the aquaculture had been mapped on to that, which relates to what I said earlier on the impact particular types of aquaculture have on particular types of environmental features and whether they can or cannot coexist, then appropriate assessments had to be carried out for that bay for all the aquaculture taking place there in order to know what could and could not, from an environmental perspective, be licensed there.

If one is dealing with oysters, oyster trellises are often placed in the same place in which the migratory birds feed. To have any basis on which the National Parks & Wildlife Service can assess the impact of the aquaculture on these migratory birds, which may be a protected species and for whom there may be a protected habitat, one needs to have some sort of time series. One is talking about gathering information for four or five years.

Two things were happening. The aquaculture was not stopped from happening and it continued on as it had before, but no new licences could be given while all that infrastructure was being built up. The appropriate assessment of a particular bay could be 500 or 600 pages of dense detailed data. All that had to be created. Only when one got out the other side of the appropriate assessment process could one then deal with the normal licensing things like navigation, safety, cage structures and all that sort of thing. There was a period from 2009 to 2012-2013 when there was no infrastructure on which one could license as it was being built. We have now got to the point since 2012-2013 where we have begun to start producing licences out of this new infrastructure, this new system, and 600 licences have been decided through that process to date. It has been sequential and it has been built up and we now have 27 bays where the appropriate assessment process, which is the end of that Natura 2000 process, has been gone through and we are clear that the scientific interests have all been identified, etc., so the foundations on which to make decisions are now there.

There are 600 licences awaiting renewal and all these people have been operating over the interim period. The figures I gave members on output give the facts on that aspect. The ability to do the licensing is now possible because all that infrastructure is in place as without that one could not do it. The target is to do 300 in 2018 and 300 in 2019. It is not just the Department which has to step up to the plate on that. There will also be the scientific advisers, the Marine Institute and BIM.

Things happened along the way that were not foreseen. Once we started doing the appropriate assessments and started looking at the licensing in bays, the people who deal with underwater archaeology showed us the new legislation that had been brought in by the Legislature on underwater archaeology and they required us to do underwater archaeology surveys on the bays before we would license. Quite a lot of people benefitted as this process moved along. Things stopped in a number of bays until we could get the underwater archaeology surveys done for those bays. There are reasons behind this; it was not just somebody being tardy.

That system has now been built. The 600 licences that went out from 2013 until now went out more or less evenly over the years. We were dealing with a situation where the 1997 Act had led to licences being written in 1998 to 2000, largely for a ten-year period. They all fell for renewal just as the ECJ judgment issued. At the very time when one would have had a logjam of renewals, one had the ECJ judgment, and that stopped matters and it took until to 2013 to get all that infrastructure in place.

Those ten-year licences will fall for renewal year by year from here on. If all the actors that are being pulled together can deliver the 600 licences over the next two years, then we will have cleared the backlog about which we talked. There will, of course, be new licences and in a few years' time, we will be back to renewal issues.

That is the explanation to the very understandable questions as why this happened and why it takes so long for someone to get a licence. Those people who were operating when all this happened were able to continue to operate. They will now get decisions on renewal. That explains the length of time and the process. The industry was at least able to continue to work through that period but there was nothing ideal about it.

Senator Mac Lochlainn asked about Scotland. In Scotland, one needs - it is all written up in the report - five to seven consents to start an aquaculture operation.

One also needs a fore-seabed and foreshore lease from the Crown Estate, a planning permission, an environmental impact assessment from the local authority, a marine licence from Marine Scotland, an authorisation to carry out aquaculture business from Marine Scotland, a controlled activity regulation from the Scottish Environmental Agency and a habitats regulations appraisal. The review group looked at the Scottish model and came back saying that there was a balance to the Irish model, where one needs two licences - an aquaculture licence for the activity that is taking place, and a foreshore licence for the foreshore one is occupying.