Mr. Conor McCabe:

I thank the Deputy for those questions and I will answer them along with my colleagues. I will give an update on the Bill. As the Deputy knows, I am responsible for the Bill. I do not have a firm or fixed date for when the Bill will come to the committee. We will be looking to publish it in the coming weeks and I hope it will not be too long after that when it gets to Committee Stage. We are looking at a matter of weeks and not months. As the Deputy knows, we received the report from the committee in mid-February. We have gone through that and I am happy to say we have been able to incorporate in the Bill a lot of the committee's recommendations. Hopefully the committee will be surprised by that. It is a more robust Bill as a result, and as a result of discussions we have had with other stakeholders. All I can say at this stage is that we will be looking to publish it in the coming weeks.

SMAZs have been removed from the Bill. There will no reference to SMAZ and we have replaced that with designated maritime area plans, DMAPs. The Minister is the competent authority for construction and marine spatial plans in the maritime area. Under the Bill, which is subject to change as it goes through the Oireachtas process, the Minister will be able to designate another competent authority to create a DMAP. That could be a local authority creating a forward plan within its nearshore area, for instance, or it could be for another Minister to create an offshore spatial plan anywhere in the maritime area. We are building the process for the creation of those DMAPs and trying to set it in legislation. Broadly speaking, it will take the form of public consultation and public participation on the proposal ahead of finalisation. As part of that finalisation process, those maritime area DMAPs will come before the Oireachtas for comments and approval, presumably before this committee, in the same way this spatial plan is coming before this committee and the Oireachtas.

We have reflected on the recommendations of the committee and one of its recommendations was the importance of public participation in all elements. We have taken that, reflected on it and created a more robust process that with which I hope members will be happy. I think they will be because more public participation is better in this regard.

That will be enhanced by environmental assessments on those plans. We will do sensitivity mapping as part of the DMAP process.

Mr. Woolley has a comment to make on the EPA and its comments on the baseline report. I will come back in on coastal partnerships and coastal local area input into more regionalised plans.