Steven Matthews (Wicklow, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

But it is the councillors who make the decision on that, based on the report from the chief executive.

We spoke about the offshore renewable development that is going to happen. A lot of the time we are worried about a lack of data and information on the marine environment, marine species and a lot of the habitats out there. Is there an opportunity there? All of these developments must go through stringent environmental impact assessments with a huge amount of data gathering. These data can add to the body of knowledge that we have on the marine environment that we do not have already. Is there an opportunity there for all of this data to be taken in by the Department, or whoever it might be, so we can start gathering a much larger database of marine environment data? Has this been considered?