Ms Attracta U? Bhroin:

I thank the Deputy. That is a very insightful question. The issue of hierarchy and consideration arises in multiple areas of the Bill where everything is bunched together in terms of "The Minister shall have regard to", and there is a list including everything. One would expect the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to be in there and it is not. Economic considerations are grouped with legally binding obligations. Exactly the same issue arose in the heads of Bill for the recent update or amendment to the climate Act. One of the things that came out of that pre-legislative scrutiny was for a very strict ordering of things that are legally binding that the Minister must make sure of, and around which the decision-making body or expert group must have very clear binding obligations for delivering and being consistent, versus things that it may just wish to take into consideration. That hierarchy is absolutely there.

I have no doubt that Ms Loughran will want to come in around the completeness of the list here. Apart from the "may", "shall", or "seek" phraseology, there is the wider issue of the binding architecture around this that is missing throughout the Bill. What fundamentally needs to inform it is delivering good environmental status and an ecologically coherent representative network. That should be guiding everything in terms of all the proposals and all of the decisions. The reflections of the expert body is missing throughout. This is why the architecture point in relation to the legal architecture informing the Bill, setting out the relevance of this piece of legislation to the marine strategy framework directive and the spatial planning directive, is absolutely key, in addition to other pieces of legislation such as the Espoo Convention. We need to be conscious not just of our obligations to notify things we are doing but for us to be much more proactive in relation to activities happening in the marine environment that have the potential to damage our networks of MPAs. Those types of things should additionally be reflected in it.

In the context of the Deputy's concerns, I would also highlight that head 7(2) explicitly says "The Minister may request advice from the Expert Body or other specialist body or other person or body as referred to in section 5(1) and section 5(2) in relation to individual proposals for potential Marine Protected Area designations." There has been a lot of talk about the expert body and very welcome consideration in relation to its appropriate composition. The Minister does not necessarily have to ask advice. He or she can decide who to talk to or who not to talk to. There is a huge issue of concern around all of that hierarchy of things, and what expert bodies would actually consider. I will ask Ms Loughran to elaborate.