Maritime Area Planning Bill 2021: Report and Final Stages
Seanad Éireann — 2021-12-17
============================================================

Alice-Mary Higgins (IND), National University of Ireland

I will not speak at length to this amendment. It outlines the need for the Department to conduct a report on all those issues I have already spoken about. We do not need to go over the ground again, but I suggest that the Department may wish to conduct a report in the next two to three months to re-examine the legislation and effect of the Act on all those issues we highlighted concerning access to justice and the Aarhus Convention. I ask the Minister of State to come back to engage with us before, for example, we see new and further planning legislation go through. It is regrettable that these issues are not addressed.
I know the Minister of the State will not accept an amendment at this point, but it would be useful if he indicated that he plans to engage with these concerns. A report is something he can agree to produce without necessarily accepting the amendment. It would be very useful because there are very genuine concerns that need to be addressed.

---

Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2021-12-17/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:49:59+00:00
Sitting date: 2021-12-17