Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The requirement is not consultation but meaningful consultation, which is a different kettle of fish. Many of us are in large organisations that have the capacity to have researchers help us to be informed when we come into forums such as this. Large industry bodies, whether they are fisheries industries or offshore wind, have those capacities as does large environmental NGOs. Very often communities or small economic interests like inshore fishermen or fisher people do not have that capacity. While I accept that the Department is and should be neutral with respect to the sectors, it should not be neutral in ensuring that the consultation engagement is meaningful. If there are certain sectors, whether they are coastal communities - and unfortunately I am very far away from Dublin Bay and I do not represent a constituency but the Chairman does - we must ensure that communities are able to meaningfully engage and likewise with inshore fishermen. When, for example, we were doing the national marine planning framework, one of the things that those two groups of people told us was that there were lots of meetings but, in many instances, they felt when they went to meetings that they were effectively excluded by the language of documentation, the nature of the consultation and the technical expert level required so they are consulted but not in any meaningful way. Some thought needs to be put in that and I will explain why. My long experience of planning is as follows: the greater the level of public participation and sectoral participation, at the earliest possible stage, removes all sorts of concerns and problems as one goes down the line, and avoids that more adversarial nature that we find in terrestrial planning where people only engage at the point in which there is an application to the board, MARA or whatever. That is my observation.

I had one other question on monitoring and the network versus the MPAs, the timelines, etc.