Ms Sin?ad Loughran:

That is certainly something that we would agree is missing in terms of that overarching vision of what we want from this Bill. Certainly, the ocean environment policy statement has the potential to almost make convoluted our existing obligations and commitments by setting priorities under which the Bill would be implemented or how we would actually use the Bill. That definitely makes things more difficult. We have already got these lists of obligations and commitments under various other agreements and we are then making another policy statement on top of that.

In terms of head 7(5), there is the caveat that “the Minister shall, to the extent possible”, and there are items that are absolutely necessary there, like the precautionary principle and that the ecosystem-based approach to marine protected areas should be a given, not something that “may” be applied. To look specifically at seabird species, IUCN lists and OSPAR lists are mentioned as items that would be considered for identifying potential marine protected areas. OSPAR only lists three of Ireland's seabirds and the IUCN list has around five species. When we put that in the context of the EU birds directive, it has many more on its annex 1 list of species and in terms of the seabirds in Ireland that are listed as either red or amber status species, there are 23 of our breeding seabirds. It definitely does not go far enough if we are just looking at the OSPAR or IUCN threatened categories because there are many seabirds in Ireland that are categorised as “least concern” or “near threatened” in the IUCN list that are actually very important seabird species in Ireland. That is just to give a bit more detail on the specifics.