Ms Patricia Comiskey:

I thank the Chair. I agree with many of the points being made on the need for greater data collection and understanding. There is the need to gather baseline information as a first point to understand what is out there but then there is also the need to monitor any conditions or if there are additional activities happening in an area, the impact of those might be looked at. What we need to be careful of is that we are not too prescriptive in a Bill. Accordingly, I suggest we look at data management and management plans that are appropriate to the sites and what we are trying to protect. From my experience of working in the marine environment for the past 20 years, we have been laggards in how the State has funded data collection at a national level. The projects we are working on are required to gather quite a significant volume of data to support their environmental impact assessments because there is no national data set. We, therefore, need to look at how we put in place the resources to staff the relevant bodies and authorities that are going to manage this, but also the systems and data collection to allow first of all for the baseline data collection and the ongoing monitoring and management of that.