Mr. Richard Cronin:

I will go back to before we started with the expert advisory body. We, as the expert team in government, have been acutely aware of the need to do this for a long time. Of course, we operate in a system and we must make sure we do what the system requires of us. To pick up on the Chair's last point, it is really clear that we have the science. The scientific facts are irrefutable. The scientists are clear, not only nationally but internationally, that there is a crisis and we must take action. The difficulty has been in our actions. Historically, we have forgotten to bring the people with us. In the establishment of the advisory body, we were conscious of capturing the views not only of life scientists but also of social scientists in order to understand the people part of it - what makes something valuable to people. We also consulted governance and legal experts to see how we would do this and what the rules around it would be. In their work, which took place during the first Covid lockdown in 2020, that group was conscious of the need to get the non-science voices and the non-expert voices. We were also conscious of this in our supporting role.

In September 2020, we held some really good round-table discussions online. We chose people from the fishing, wind and tourism sectors, along with local representatives, local communities and environmental groups, and we sat them in virtual round-tables with an independent moderator. We gave them a short presentation and asked them what they liked and did not like and what they were worried about. Their feedback is in the expert report. We thought they would resist the idea of MPAs, but they did not. Everybody was in favour at that point, before we went to public consultation. They all said that they wanted to know and they wanted to be involved. They wanted to be told. As the Chairman suggested, they did not want to find out after the event when they would have to manage the change and the disruption and when people would be angry and confused about why we are doing this. We suddenly realised that our challenge was around participation. The science will support it, but it is about getting participation right. That report was published in February 2021.

Then we launched a public consultation. It was online and semi-structured so there was a set of questions and also some open text. We run consultations for a lot of other environmental issues around the sea where you might get 50 or 60 keen respondents. In this case, we got over 2,300 individual responses so the response was overwhelming. The number was really big and it covered everybody. We received responses not just from those in urban areas who are really aware of this issue, but also from all the rural communities, all the sectors involved in the sea and all age groups. We were really impressed by the response. As part of the consultation, before we analysed the responses in the summer of 2021, we went around the coastline. We still had social distancing. We sat outside in circles outside carparks and we gave our show and tell. The Minister of State, Deputy Noonan, was with us. We gave our show and tell and we had a discussion under the Chatham House rule about what they liked, what they did not like and what they were worried about. It was the same response as we got before. The fishermen, for example, said they were the only group who needed a healthy marine environment to carry out their activity. They need to be involved because they have invested in its sector. If there is change coming, they need to be involved in how the change will happen and how they will participate in the process. This reinforced the message we got from the first piece of work with the expert group. Then the consultation analysis said the exact same thing.

We then moved to the drafting of this. We could write down that the Minister shall designate, but it is the build-out from that where the challenge arises because consultation is easy. You press pause and go out and ask a simple question. Participation as we see it, and as we heard from the public, from society and from the various sectors, has two parts. The first part is that they want to be involved in the identification of what is important to protect because that may not always be the thing we prioritise. In a coastal community, its local environment may be much more important than the specific species or habitat. The second part is how you get meaningful engagement in the design of a site. In this general scheme, we have tried to create ad hocgroups that would work in an informal way to help to deliver the work for the expert group. You could bring in everybody who has an interest in a particular location, species or habitat - everybody who has information or a view on what should happen - and then create some sort of consensus on collaborating. That is what we have tried to design but it comes from what we know will work. We also looked at best international practice. Many protected sites around the world have been accused by outside bodies, by the environmental pillar, as being paper parks. They exist as a shape on a map and nothing else.

We have tried here to create the design of the management recommendations with the designation, that is to try and connect the two of them. It may not always be possible and they may have to be done one after the other but the objective would be to do the two at the same time so that there is certainty that the site is there and what it will mean. I am reminded of some of the interventions by committee members about offshore renewables, for example, or an operative sector. Certainty is the big thing that everybody needs to have around what it will mean for them. We have tried to incorporate that. What we noticed about our approach and what the public told us was that when we saw what the convention on biological diversity has been doing since 2020, we realised that it is about all of society doing this together for the benefit of society and nature. We think we have captured it in an Irish context for the marine environment. That is the objective of what we are trying to achieve. It comes from what the public has said it wants. The public has concerns, of course. This affects different groups in different ways. For some people, it is their livelihood and for others, it is how they feel about things. We need to make sure that as we go forward they are all included. That is what we are trying to capture.