Results 6,261-6,280 of 14,943 for speaker:Eoin Ó Broin

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government: General Scheme of the Marine Protected Areas Bill 2023: Discussion (26 Jan 2023)

Eoin Ó Broin: Yes. I thank the Chair. I apologise, again, for having to leave as we have a clash with the Minister, Deputy Darragh O’Brien, in the Chamber, which is unfortunate. I am going to go back over some of my questions. If our witnesses have dealt with them in my absence, please do not repeat the replies. Let me know, and I will read these replies in the transcripts because I do not want...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government: General Scheme of the Marine Protected Areas Bill 2023: Discussion (26 Jan 2023)

Eoin Ó Broin: Does Mr. Cronin hope for the qualification threshold or elements of it to be set out in legislation?

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government: General Scheme of the Marine Protected Areas Bill 2023: Discussion (26 Jan 2023)

Eoin Ó Broin: Does Mr. Cronin envisage it as a process whereby third parties might have an opportunity for input without making it overly cumbersome or time-consuming?

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government: General Scheme of the Marine Protected Areas Bill 2023: Discussion (26 Jan 2023)

Eoin Ó Broin: With respect to that, one thing that we have learned from terrestrial planning and our long consideration of issues around substitute consent is that while many things are possible, unless legislation sets them out and, in certain circumstances, mandates either exploration or potential recommendation of them, they are less likely to happen. While we may finally have a substitute consent...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government: General Scheme of the Marine Protected Areas Bill 2023: Discussion (26 Jan 2023)

Eoin Ó Broin: I accept all that. I will make one other analogy. We have much experience of terrestrial planning and building control. There are bad practices in our recent past that we need to learn from. For example, people who build buildings on land have a legal obligation to build in compliance with the standards. Two weeks ago, the Government announced a €2.5 billion bill for the taxpayer...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government: General Scheme of the Marine Protected Areas Bill 2023: Discussion (26 Jan 2023)

Eoin Ó Broin: As somebody who has been so involved with building defects, I will labour the point. We now have a €5 billion bill for building defects, both defective blocks and houses, apartments and duplexes. We have had good building control standards over the years. There is a legal obligation for people to comply and there is a mechanism if they do not comply to take them to court but it is...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government: General Scheme of the Marine Protected Areas Bill 2023: Discussion (26 Jan 2023)

Eoin Ó Broin: The Department would not find an objection from most committee members to the idea of priorities because the Department cannot do all of this work at the same time. In areas where there are MACs or other potential significant economic marine activities, there are two values of clear priorities. First, it avoids accidental or intentional additional marine biodiversity degradation as a result...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government: General Scheme of the Marine Protected Areas Bill 2023: Discussion (26 Jan 2023)

Eoin Ó Broin: Yes, I caught that.

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government: General Scheme of the Marine Protected Areas Bill 2023: Discussion (26 Jan 2023)

Eoin Ó Broin: Did Mr. Cronin refer to the involvement of Marine Institute or bodies with environmental expertise?

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government: General Scheme of the Marine Protected Areas Bill 2023: Discussion (26 Jan 2023)

Eoin Ó Broin: I will check the transcript. Perfect.

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government: General Scheme of the Marine Protected Areas Bill 2023: Discussion (26 Jan 2023)

Eoin Ó Broin: The requirement is not consultation but meaningful consultation, which is a different kettle of fish. Many of us are in large organisations that have the capacity to have researchers help us to be informed when we come into forums such as this. Large industry bodies, whether they are fisheries industries or offshore wind, have those capacities as does large environmental NGOs. Very often...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government: General Scheme of the Marine Protected Areas Bill 2023: Discussion (26 Jan 2023)

Eoin Ó Broin: Excellent.

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government: General Scheme of the Marine Protected Areas Bill 2023: Discussion (26 Jan 2023)

Eoin Ó Broin: It was on monitoring post-designation. I am asking about monitoring of the network and the individual marine protected areas. Who is doing it and how is it being done? What level of resourcing is there for that?

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government: General Scheme of the Marine Protected Areas Bill 2023: Discussion (26 Jan 2023)

Eoin Ó Broin: Again, what is being monitored? Is it the network? Is it individual marine protected areas or portions of them? How is the monitoring envisaged?

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government: General Scheme of the Marine Protected Areas Bill 2023: Discussion (26 Jan 2023)

Eoin Ó Broin: I have one finally supplementary question on that. If I remember correctly, when we were dealing with the national marine planning framework, one of the debates we had was on whether the overall policy approach of the framework and all of the bits that fit into it, including marine protected areas, was adopting a full ecosystem and whole site approach rather than just identifying individual...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government: General Scheme of the Marine Protected Areas Bill 2023: Discussion (26 Jan 2023)

Eoin Ó Broin: May I qualify the Chair's question in a way that would be really helpful for us and for others? This obviously sits in a wider architecture. It would be really useful if Dr. O'Higgins could describe the bits of that architecture. We have management authorities, enforcement authorities, monitoring obligations, the Department, MARA, the board and the local authorities. It would be really...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government: General Scheme of the Marine Protected Areas Bill 2023: Discussion (26 Jan 2023)

Eoin Ó Broin: I apologise. I meant a PhD in the history of what I am looking at, which is big and complicated.

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government: General Scheme of the Marine Protected Areas Bill 2023: Discussion (26 Jan 2023)

Eoin Ó Broin: I apologise, Chair, but-----

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government: General Scheme of the Marine Protected Areas Bill 2023: Discussion (26 Jan 2023)

Eoin Ó Broin: If I were standing on the coast near a marine protected area and I thought something was in breach of the designation, who would I call?

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government: General Scheme of the Marine Protected Areas Bill 2023: Discussion (26 Jan 2023)

Eoin Ó Broin: Who are they likely to be?