Ms Sin?ad Loughran:

I thank the Chair and the committee members for their time. I echo the comments made by my colleagues about the ambition of legislation and the robustness. We would be completely supportive of pushing for more ambitious legislation that is more robust in nature. To pick up on one of Deputy Ó Broin's last points on the data and whether we balance the precautionary principle or proceed without data, it is also about having the right data. That point gets missed a lot. A lot of the data we need to track seabirds and understand the life cycles and needs of seabirds in Ireland, we just do not have. We need to be collecting the right data to get that information. That links back to the monitoring gap that was mentioned throughout the discussions. There is not any additional monitoring requirement in this Bill. That is certainly something that needs to be included because as it stands the MSFD is just not delivering on the kind of information we need. There are so many elements of the marine ecosystem whose status is just unknown, whether it is 60% of commercially exploited fish species or 41% of non-commercially exploited fish. Food webs as a whole are a category that is just unknown. That is certainly something we need to see in the legislation, as well as additional monitoring that actually covers the entirety of the marine environment.