Mr. Niall Goodwin:

We both agree that the period for consultation is too tight. My colleagues mentioned that public participation is really important in all of this and we need to make sure people have the opportunity to feed into this process and have their voices heard in terms of how we do this. Regarding eight or ten weeks, we say eight weeks would be good. There is general agreement that it needs to be more than four weeks, which is good to see.

In terms of the grounds for decisions being in writing and laid before the Houses of the Oireachtas, what we are looking for here is full transparency. We need to be very clear why decisions are being made. Someone developing an offshore wind farm needs to be very clear on why this designation has been made. Equally, members of the public, affected communities and members of environmental NGOs will want to be very clear regarding why a decision has been taken. That is the only reason we are looking for that to be done. Mr. Devane, who has a bit more detail on this, might be able to expand on my point.