Mr. Bernard Nolan:

I will take the questions on the public consultation, the EIA and the pre-application engagement. To be clear on how the new regime is intended to operate, it is a two-stage procedure. The first stage, the maritime area consent, MAC, looks very closely at the property, the person and whether that person can actually do what he or she is proposing, and then agrees the financial terms. That MAC is then subject to a development consent which would be considered by An Bord Pleanála or the local authority, depending on the development type. The larger scale offshore stuff would definitely be considered by An Bord Pleanála. The formal environmental impact assessment is within that development consent procedure, and that also includes the formal opportunity for public participation in the development consent decision-making. Related to that, and this might relate to some earlier questions as well so hopefully this will give some clarity, before a developer applies for a MAC obligations are set out that it will have to engage with impacted stakeholders. It is not possible to set out who those stakeholders will be in primary legislation because we are building a regime for a variety of scales, from slipways all the way up to wind farms. The level of engagement required in any particular case might be quite different but the principles are the same. The purpose of this is to identify issues of importance for the public and identify the potentially impacted marine users. The national marine planning framework will help do that and when the guidelines are developed, they will provide even more detail regarding who might potentially be impacted.

At the moment, public consultation in the context of development consent is quite often adversarial and we have found that under the Foreshore Act, there is an established application and there is opposition to it. This Act seeks to mitigate that by placing the obligation on developers to engage with impacted stakeholders before a MAC application is made. This has a number of purposes. It ensures early and widespread awareness of proposals, it ensures developers engage with the stakeholders, and there is clarity among the public on what the proposal actually is. Issues of concern are identified very early in the process by the developer at the project concept stage and necessary considerations, accommodations and synergies can be built into the project design rather than bolted on later. We will be setting this out in the statutory obligation within the guidelines themselves. However, we are also examining the possibility of putting it in as a set criteria in the MAC that if the Minister was not satisfied with the level of public or stakeholder engagement relevant to the project, the application would be deemed incomplete and would not even pass the first gate.