Cian O'Callaghan (Dublin Bay North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

The professor's input will be very useful to the committee when we compile our pre-legislative report because we need to specifically consider the heads and see if there are particular areas that need to be tidied up.

Head 7 concerns the identification of potential marine protected areas. My reading of head 7 is that it is a fairly top-down process - the Minister does it and there are four weeks. I am sure we all agree that four weeks is not an acceptable amount of time for the public consultation process. I did not get a sense from reading head 7 that the process was anything remotely close to co-creation. Have I got that wrong or am I not being optimistic enough?