Mr. Patrick Lyne:

On the Aarhus Convention, it would be very useful if the facility was there to notify people who are interested in things like foreshore licences that it has come up for public consultation. At the moment, we have some 30 foreshore licences in the status of "applied" and they are not there for consultation. Then one has 28 days, for example, with a foreshore licence to submit one's consultation, wording or whatever. It would be very useful if one did not have to go in and check every day or whatever. I think many people are missed from the consultation process because they are not aware a licence has come up for consultation.

With regard to maintaining biodiversity in Irish waters one of the issues that has not yet been discussed is acoustic monitoring. Perhaps I am jumping the gun but we need an acoustic monitoring network. We need to be able to monitor not just anthropogenic or man-made noise in the ocean, or impulsive noise, which comes from the information submitted by companies doing seismic surveys, or continuous noise which is shipping noise that comes from AIS. We need hydrophones in the water to listen to what is going on, because we are not aware of the noise in our oceans. We are also not aware of the fish and cetaceans that are present in Irish waters or their use of such waters, because we have no acoustic monitoring network.