Dr. Conor McCabe:

I thank Senator Seery Kearney for her questions. I will take the second question first and bring in others to answer that. There are a number of strands to how people on the ground will view these plans.

Our next step, apart from setting up the monitoring process Mr. Woolley mentioned earlier, will be to consider the process of regional plans and local marine plans. I see this as the intersection point of many strategies coming together in one episode, such as the recently released rural strategy, the future loading coastal erosion strategy, the localised elements of the national development plan, and other areas such as that which are all marine focused. At present, there is no local strategy that will take into account all the plans on the marine side of life and we will consider that next.

The second part is on how we will bring about strategies to implement it at a local level. We are considering a number of things, one among them being training. Last year, we organised a conference for local authority planners to introduce what marine planning will look like. We followed that with workshops and strands.

The Marine Institute is active in this area. Ms Nic Aonghusa might come in here to talk about initiatives the institute has introduced in terms of building awareness around maritime and marine spatial planning.