Mr. Conall O'Connor:

I do not have any doubts. I reiterate that what we are aiming for and a fundamental pillar of what we are trying to achieve to deliver this protection of the environment is the concept of participation and very high levels of it. In my opening statement, I made reference to the fact that we want a model flexible enough to deal with close-to-shore areas with a lot of interests, stakeholders, citizens with views and businesses, and more remote areas where there are a discrete number of interested bodies, specialists and experts. There needs to be full participation in the identification of things to protect and in the development of an approach to protecting them, especially in the design of the management of the site, in other words, management recommendations, but also in our engagement with sectors like fisheries. It is clear they have knowledge we do not get from scientific research, which we also get from local coastal communities. We need to be able to design a system that allows the designation to capture that information so that, when we move to the development of management activities, whether that is management that intervenes in some way with human activity or that is education and guidance, the people who will need to take it up are part of the design process. That is what we have tried to do.

Regarding monitoring, there is already a national monitoring programme for the marine environment, which runs on six-year cycles. This marine protected area exercise and work to create these designations forms part of a wider programme to protect the marine environment. The monitoring programme falls under that.