Dr. Cecil Beamish:

We deal with the growing. If somebody wants to set up a seaweed farm and that activity is under way, we deal with the licensing of it but the management of the foreshore is all managed by the Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government, as is taking anything off the foreshore whether it is sand, rocks, gravel or seaweed.

With regard to the question on renewable energy, there is an EU directive on marine spatial planning. At the risk of being wrong, because I do not have the date here with me, we have to have a marine spatial plan in place by 2020 or 2021. Work has commenced with the Marine Institute on doing all the scientific research to underpin such a plan. The Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government will ultimately publish the plan and we will be moving forward on the basis of planning and development and working within the framework of the marine spatial plan.

While it is evolving, it is not there at the moment in respect of renewable energy, oil, gas, aquaculture or fisheries. It is much more complicated than terrestrial planning because one is operating in a three-dimensional environmental - what is underneath the seabed, what is sitting on top of it, what is in the water column and what is on the surface. A variety of consenting bodies, some national and some international, govern this. In fisheries, for example, everything is covered by the Common Fisheries Policy of the EU. One cannot simply make a plan and zone fishing in one area or another or restrict it. One must go through a process of interacting with the other affected member states before anything like that can be defined, given that it would impact on their interests and rights.

A directive, a commitment and a timeline for producing a marine spatial plan are in place. Ironically, much of the mapping that we did under Natura will feed into that because many of the inshore bays have been mapped by virtue of that process in a way they never were previously. That information has been reused. A wider mapping exercise of our seabed, called INFOMAR, has also been under way for a number of years. Ireland is probably well ahead of everyone else in that respect. All of that will be pulled together by the Marine Institute as the scientific advisory body to the Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government on this issue. That work is under way.