Mr. Richard Cronin:

I thank the Chairman and the Deputy. I get a sense we are coming close to the end of this meeting, so before I go any further I would like to thank my colleague, Dr. Ó Cadhla, who is the brains in this operation. While he has not spoken today, he is the person who provides me with most of the useful points that come out of my mouth; the rest of it is all my own fault.

On the particular issue, in my opening comments I described where we are. We have started the development of the general scheme on the new legislation. There is a list of things that we are going to link that to, including requirements of certain European directives, the EU green deal and, most important for us, the findings of the expert advisory report and the views of the stakeholders. We are at that stage. We hope to have that delivered by quarter 3, 2022 and we think that with the help of everybody who is going to support the process we can get the legislation together by 2023. There are other legislative models similar to our legal code that help us to understand what needs to go into the legislation. We have an understanding of the different processes such as the identification of the things that need protection, the criteria for qualification as highlighted by Deputy Boyd Barrett, the consultation and, most important, the participation process. I would be strongly in favour of a stewardship model as opposed to a box ticking consultation. I think that is the next stage in our development of engagement. That piece is a big challenge, but it is important to face up to it. That has to be designed.

On the creation of the designation, the management plan piece has to be put in place, which is the relationship with other legal requirements and obligations and how all of that is represented. In other words, where does it go to and do we just see it on a map? How we understand it is the communication and education piece. When we get to the end of that journey for a marine protected area, there is the journey back to the start to check that everything is working, which is the monitoring programme, to adapt, update, improve and change if necessary. I made the point in one of my earlier comments that once we set up the legislation, we will have a process that will go on and on. We are looking now at 30% coverage. We will be, I believe, looking at a different number at some point after the end of this decade. We are looking at a part of governance reform here that is including protection as part of the overall plan to develop our marine environment and giving it a solid, independent footing such that we are confident we are making good decisions, so that we can provide assurance that the environment is improving and that it is protected, where necessary, and that when we carry out human activities we can say with confidence they are sustainable as opposed to just putting the word "sustainable" in front of everything we do. We must have meat on that frame.

That is where we are at. That is our journey over the next year to year and a half. As I said earlier, we have committed to creating a parallel set of timelines across all of the different processes, including the environment processes, the birds habitats directive and the spatial planning processes and, hopefully, incorporating other processes such as offshore renewable development plans and so on. We want to create an overall set of timelines such that we can then understand whether the risk around the potential mismatch in the delivery of different things is real or not, whether the spatial impact - where we want to put activities - is real and, where we propose to put the marine protected areas, which will be where we think the habitats and species are. We can have that mapped out. From that mapping exercise, we can then make decisions about how real the risk is and what actions need to be taken to mitigate that risk. There is a precautionary approach, as we discussed in the evidence and in the questions and answers today.

That is the plan. The next step is to take off the suit and start doing it. While we may be the responsible people to do this, this is something that will happen for all of society. For all the marine stakeholders, the people, Deputies and Senators, we will be the ones stewarding this, but it is really important that we all do this together. That is clear from the feedback we have had. To summarise the 2,400 public consultation responses we received, everybody wants them and they all want to be involved.