Mr. Richard Cronin:

We are co-ordinating the stuff we are doing. That is the best I can say to the Chairman without saying that we are not co-ordinating it. If a private company is doing something and there is commercial confidentiality around the information they are gathering for their own internal decision-making processes, I presume this would still apply to them. From our point of view, we have a co-ordinated monitoring programme to gather all of that data to make a set of decisions around the health of the environment, which we do every six years. So in that regard, yes we are co-ordinating.

When we look at having all of the information that is available to make good decisions - for example, we might want to make a designation decision or a decision on management or monitoring - what we are trying to capture in this general scheme is a structure where we can get all of the information that can be given to the experts, and that this can be brought forward. Perhaps it could be the private sector monitoring the information or data, or it could be research institutes, or local or national public bodies. We are also very keen to ensure that non-scientific knowledge is included in those data. This includes place names, local practices, history, and the experiences of people who engage with the sea, and how they describe that. We would like to capture all of that information. There is a large data set then available to us through the Marine Institute, but often we need to make sure that the data have a set of quality standards to them. There are other issues around these data such as the timeline for data and the quality standards before we can say it is appropriate to use those data.