Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I might make a couple of comments before returning to questions. To be clear, my proposition at the start was for something similar to pre-legislative scrutiny. While it is the case that pre-legislative scrutiny is carried out on Bills, section 73 of the Planning and Development Act, the relevant section for dealing with this plan, provides that Oireachtas committees can compile reports and the Minister has to have regard to those reports. My idea was that we might hold a second hearing, at which we invite in some other stakeholders to give their views, and we may or may not as a committee want to give our views to the Minister in the form of a report.

The more I listen, the more some of the concerns I had at the outset are coming back. They are similar concerns to those I had when we were dealing with the marine planning and development management Bill. This is not in any way to question either the large volume of work or effort of the officials but rather to tease out some of these matters. Part of my concern is that on the one hand, we have an urgent need for large-scale offshore wind energy production and a range of a products that are champing at the bit and ready to go. We all want those projects to be up and running and we all want that renewable energy. The fact that we are so far behind on the marine protected areas, however, that our environmental baseline information is still not where we would like it to be in terms of impacts and state of play for various marine species, and even the fact we are talking about coastal partnerships but they are small or limited in number, suggests we could end up in a position in which none of us wishes to be, where we end up having a conflict between large-scale industrial development of offshore wind, on the one hand, and the protection of our marine environment and smaller scale coastal communities, on the other. The attempt to avoid that is what many of us are raising here.

One of the questions I asked earlier related to monitoring and enforcement, as one of the other criticisms or concerns the EPA had raised. Given that fisheries and aquaculture are still dealt with by a separate Department, albeit in the context of this plan, we could again have those inevitable tensions between larger scale industrial fishing and aquaculture and smaller inshore fishing communities and their economic viability. That is something we need to avoid.

I am still concerned that the three legs of this stool, namely, the marine protected area legislation, the marine planning and development management Bill and the marine planning framework, are not all visible to us at the same time, although, obviously, they all sit within the architecture of the relevant EU directives.

For those of us who are not experts in this area or do not have the long experience of the departmental officials, it is difficult trying to read where the document before us sits alongside one Bill that has been substantially revised and we have not seen, and another Bill that we do not know when we will get to see, particularly given that we are meant to have an ecosystems-led approach to this spatially and temporally. For non-experts, putting all of that together is tough.

I am concerned by the issue of mapping and the information we are getting on same. The suggestion seems to be that it is a lagging indicator responding to developments rather than what many of us understand mapping to be in the context of county development plans, where we would set out clearly in mapping what was open for consideration in any part of the terrestrial space and planning authorities would then make decisions on whether space was mixed use, residential or commercial. I find it difficult to understand how a competent planning authority could make informed decisions, in particular about the impact of certain kinds of industrial activity on precarious marine ecosystems, without the necessary information. I appreciate that some of these issues are not the responsibility or fault of the people from the Department who are giving us this briefing, but we must take them into account. I am still minded that we need further committee scrutiny or whatever we call it, although I hear the point clearly that this process cannot drag on and must be time limited.

Could we have more information on the point about monitoring enforcement that the EPA raised? I am interested in the timeline for the upskilling of our planning authorities, given the complexity of the decisions that they will be making. I am intrigued by how the planning framework interacts with the licensing of aquaculture and fisheries. I am sure that the Department would informally prefer all of these matters to be dealt with by a single lead Department, but will the witnesses talk us through how the framework interacts with the current division of responsibilities between their Department and the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine?

We have been discussing the plan's spatial nature a great deal, but it must also be a temporal plan that considers future uses. Given the negative impacts of some activities on our marine ecosystems, will one of the witnesses talk through in the simplest terms possible for us lay people the plan's key temporal aspects and how they interact with the spatial aspects?