Manus Boyle (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State and offer him my congratulations. This Bill will hopefully provide a higher standard of care for the people working within the marine industry. Unfortunately tragedies do happen despite everybody's best efforts. The MAIU will report and I hope people will become familiar with the investigation and the safety recommendations. This is where we were falling down before. The families affected were getting no feedback from the other board. Families deserve to know what is going on with investigations. Hopefully, this new MAIU will establish relationships with the families.

As my counterpart, Senator Blaney, said, wind energy is going to be massive off the Irish coast. We need to be mapping the plan for that now. It is too late when everything starts to kick in. We need to know what is happening and what vessels can be used and their size. The whole matter has to be laid out in a plan.

If there is an investigation, there has to be one standard across the board. As the Leader said, one of the issues is in regard to who is responsible. Is it ship A or ship B? Since Saturday I have been talking about this Bill with a couple of people who are very worried about this. Who is going to make this recommendation? Who is going to say who is at fault? We need clarity on that. At the end of the day, somebody is going to get the blame if there is an accident. It needs to be clarified whether it is ship A or ship B.