Dr. Cecil Beamish:

The Deputy is correct that when the marine co-ordination group was set up in 2009 and decided to create the first national integrated marine development plan, national, international and global discussion was much less focused on climate change. It was not an issue in the way it now is. However, sustainability was, and always has been, a matter of concern. Even the title of the integrated plan, Harnessing Our Ocean Wealth, shows it is underpinned by sustainability. It was recognised that we were working towards Ireland trying to get more in terms of the marine, our understanding of marine resources, how we can manage them and what we can or cannot do. That will be achieved by pulling together the various parts across the Government such that the whole adds up to more than the sum of the parts. One of the underpinnings of the review of Harnessing Our Ocean Wealth was an attempt to better understand what we have. The major integrated mapping for the sustainable development of Ireland's marine resource, INFOMAR, project which is mapping the seabed has been going on for many years and continues to receive funding. A world-leading map has been developed of our resources. That did not exist before this project, which ran in parallel with the harnessing our ocean wealth review. We have carried out a variety of research projects to better understand our marine resources and how the marine functions because we cannot do anything on climate change unless we understand how it is going.

We developed the Atlantic Ocean Research Alliance because we cannot understand the Atlantic on our own. Alliances were built with Canada, the United States and other EU member states in order to try to improve the total understanding of the mechanism of the Atlantic, which is vital to everything on this island. The language was not about climate change but, rather, sustainability and researching and understanding the resource and its dynamics. All of the fisheries research that has been done through the years has helped us to understand how to sustainably harvest that resource, but it has also given us indicators of climate change - canaries in the mine - which can be used to see how things are changing in the ocean as well as for managing the fisheries resources. We have biological indicators of what is changing. All of that provides a very strong bedrock for moving to climate action.

The work that has been done will provide a very strong foundation for the next phase of climate action and sustainable management of the resource.