Mr. Conor McCabe:

I will let Mr. Woolley or Mr. O'Meara answer the Deputy's questions with regard to environmental assessments and the changes made, if they would like to come in on those points. I will address the issues in respect of the maritime spatial planning directive but I will first thank the Deputy very much for his kind comments and his questions. We believe we are in full compliance with the directive. We do not have an independent assessment. We have been working with our appointed consultants, RPS Group, on the environmental aspects. I am sure Mr. Woolley or Mr. O'Meara will say more about that in a second. The consultants highlighted areas we needed to mitigate and work on and we have certainly done that over the past 12 months. That is as close to an independent assessment we have got. I have full confidence that we are in compliance with the maritime spatial planning directive. After this is approved by the Oireachtas, we will be sending this to our colleagues in the Commission.

They will be looking at all the various marine special plans in the round and reporting back to us in the next few months. I anticipate a positive report from them on our compliance levels but I suppose that is where it will surface if there is anything we need to work on in terms of implementation or anything we may have overlooked. It has been a thorough costs test involving many different parties and stakeholders across government and I am fairly confident we hit all the marks we needed to hit and more. My colleagues might want to come in on the environmental assessments specifically.