Mr. Tom Woolley:

I thank the Senator for clarifying. We have been working with organisations such as the Irish Planning Institute, the Local Government Management Agency and others to run events. I spoke at one event last week in which approximately 200 people attended online. There was a big appetite among local authorities to understand what was going on, not just in terms of the plan but the legislation on which the committee has already heard evidence, as well as what has been mentioned on the marine protected areas. There is a substantial awareness in that community that significant changes are afoot and it needs to consider what is coming and be ready for it.

In my talk to the IPI, Irish Planning Institute, last week, for example, I emphasised that this is a plan and it should not see this as separate. Instead, wherever possible, it should seek to integrate it as a factor in its existing planning mechanisms. That will be a theme I will be looking at continuing as we engage with people implementing this plan. While the NMPF for various reasons has quite a different look and feel, both to local authority plans and to national policy, it fits and tries to deliver things from the international level all the way down to local level in one go. We must make people feel comfortable in that this is not entirely foreign to the systems they already have and can be bought into. For example, one can look at an existing assessment to see where bits of the NMPF can be bought into that. These are the kinds of approaches we are hoping to embed in people's minds.

I cannot say we have a fixed timeline in terms of implementation. Mr. Conor McCabe may want to come in on the timeline related to the Bill and the implementation of measures. We are looking to increasingly build on those relationships with existing bodies and their continuing professional development opportunities to make sure people build the skills, identify gaps that we address, make linkages between agencies, such as the Marine Institute which has some of the technical expertise, and build tools which can be used at national level to make sure it is a co-ordinated and consistent application of the NMPF in those processes. For example, I referred earlier to a digital tool. We have a phase 1 which will be out this year. We will be updating it with much more substantial tools in the next couple of years, based on projects we have in the works.