Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 2 February 2023

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government

General Scheme of the Marine Protected Areas Bill 2023: Discussion (Resumed)

Mr. Niall Goodwin:

I thank the Senator for her question. I can start off and I might ask my colleague, Ms Comiskey, to expand on some of the detail from a developer perspective. The ask is basically for legal certainty on where this applies. We will remember back to before Christmas when we had the proposed change to the foreshore area to extend to the airspace. That was ultimately withdrawn because there were various problems with it. In this case, we just want to make sure that we are clear on what can be done and where. That requires it to be fully and clearly defined so there is legal certainty for a project. Developers looking to carry out surveys or do the preparatory work needed to make sure their project has the absolute minimal environmental impact possible want to be able to know exactly the area they are allowed to operate in and what they can do there. I might pass to Ms Comiskey to explain the risk that a project needs to be certain of.

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