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

I am very keen that the people who may be listening in to this debate will understand. We are genuinely interrogating this because we want to understand fully and for the legislation to be as good as it can be. When a development plan is being put together there are people in the council department, for example, who may have developed a knowledge and experience over many years in the particular parts for which they are responsible for the drafts. There is a certain experience and knowledge and so on. Then there is the established process, which we are always trying to improve, of public participation in that. We are in new territory here. One of the things I was very struck by in the industry lobbying, or their vision document, is that essentially they were saying "we have the expertise and nobody else has the expertise". This was their justification for having a developer-led approach: "we know the stuff and nobody else does". The question is about who the competent authority is and what sort of expert advice they will depend on for the drafting of plans. This notion that developers are experts - and one can see why they would want this - and that everybody else does not really know what they are talking about is not the way things are going to be. As we have said, the huge amount of knowledge and expertise we actually need to input into maritime spatial plans is that of the real stakeholders: the people who know the area, the people who live in the area and people like the fishers and others who know a particular maritime environment.

I echo the questions about the public participation statement and seek some elaboration on that. It is stated the Minister may, by regulation, specify those requirements so the Minister of State might explain why this is just "may". The logic of our amendments is to try to tie down the requirements in terms of public participation in the development of marine spatial plans.