Mr. Conor McCabe:

Once we have finalised this plan we will not walk away from it. There will be a lot of implementation and ongoing consultation on this plan into the future. There should not be any kind of end point. Sub-national planning is where local authorities and people living at local level will see the intersection of how this plan affects their lives or how they can reflect future plans. Our plan would be for two phases of sub-national planning. Again, there is no end point for these as they are recurring things. We will have regional plans which, from what we have heard from the public consultations, is what people want. Maybe that is because that is what they are familiar with but that is what we will be looking at. There will probably be three regional plans with one for each of the sea areas, that is, the east coast, the south coast and the Atlantic-facing coast. When we get down to the nitty-gritty it will be at local area level. The legislation is broad enough that we can create plans that might cover a few local authorities, or a smaller plan could cover one local authority.

Something we also want to roll out over the next year is pilot coastal partnerships. Deputy Ó Broin was asking about this as well and about how locals can influence marine planning. I will just speak about one of those coastal partnerships. I would hope to take a bay area such as Clew Bay or Bantry Bay, where there is a lot of good work happening already, and create local advisory groups that would take ownership of the marine planning process, feed into it and, in some ways, direct it. That should be carried out through the local authority and elected members should have a lot of influence over those groups. That would really put shape on what type of forward plan those areas will have over the next ten to 20 years. We will take that back up and do our best to implement it in that manner. A lot of this will be new. Some of these pilot projects will not work and will fail but I am hoping one or two will work and will find a successful model that we can push out, inasmuch as we can, right around the country. That will take a few years but-----