Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

We all have the same amendments that all try to achieve the same end. I was commenting to one of the officials, who I think agreed with me, that this is complicated. It is a huge Bill that is extremely complicated. We are referring to multiple pieces of legislation and there are almost more acronyms than there are letters in the alphabet. We have MACs, DMAPs, the NMPF, multiple directives and MARA and now we have these policy statements. What is the acronym for them? It is MPPS. As a Deputy, I find this difficult. If I was a member of the public, I would be baffled as to how this process will operate. It would be very useful if a idiot's guide with a visual map of how these different elements interact could be produced. In this case, we have a new acronym, which is the MPPS, which is the Minister making statements of principles. How exactly do they relate to all the other different moving parts in this? How do they relate to the national marine planning framework, which will be reviewed from time to time? How will the national marine planning framework or the reviewed version of that framework be informed? What will it be informed by?

To what extent will the statements of objectives and policies that the Minister might make be required to be compliant with the various directives? How do they relate to the frameworks and reviews? We need to understand all of this architecture and it needs to be set out in the clearest possible terms. A visual representation of these parts would be useful for us because we will be at this for weeks. I know one cannot be produced overnight, but it would be helpful.

Ministers cannot make any old statement that throws everything in a particular direction just because that is what they like doing, or can they? Who might be influencing a Minister when he or she is coming out with particular statements in respect of policies and objectives? One of the amendments deals with the representations the Minister may receive. We need to know about those if statements are being made. Critically, we need to know that the governing framework for policy statements dictating how planning and development are done and what type of planning and development is done in our marine environment is informed, constrained and regulated by all of the various directives in terms of marine spatial planning, protection of biodiversity and habitats, and so on. We need to know that the tail is not wagging the dog in how we undertake marine planning and development.

That is a brief summary of the logic behind this series of amendments. I would like to hear the Minister of State's response. I hope to hear a positive signal from him and his officials about them putting together the kind of map I mentioned to show how these various elements relate to one another, given that it is not entirely clear. Things are floating around, to use a marine metaphor.