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

Given we have only a few minutes left, I reserve the right to come back on some of the latter amendments in this group as I will only get to the first few.

Again, some of my questioning is really just an invitation for the Minister of State to explain the intricacies of this process a little more on the public record. Most of us have experience of terrestrial planning and we know the planning framework is the overarching strategy. There are also county and city development plans and local area plans, with ministerial guidelines in between, some of which are controversial and some of which are not.

I am understanding it better as we go through this process but we have a marine planning policy statement, a marine planning framework and then maritime and spatial plans. We will get on to designated marine area plans, DMAPs, in a later section. Specifically with the maritime spatial plan, I am still not clear what it brings to this part of the architecture that is not already in the other elements. My understanding is it may be geographically more limited and there may be some more detail.

At an earlier stage the Minister of State said there is no plan as detailed as the marine planning framework. In some sense that is probably not an accurate way to describe it in the sense-----