Public Consultation Report on the National Marine Planning Framework (NMPF) Published.

The Minister of Housing, Local Government and Heritage, Darragh O’Brien and Minister of State for Local Government and Planning, Peter Burke published the National Marine Planning Framework consultation report on May 24th, 2022. In approving the report for publishing, both Ministers reiterated that public participation was an integral element of the NMPF public consultation process, which ran from 12th November 2019 to 30th April 2020, having been twice extended due to Covid-19 related restrictions.

The Department received 225 formal submissions to the draft NMPF public consultation, which were subsequently collated and assessed, being further broken down into over 3,500 individual comments specific to each relevant section of the NMPF.

The NMPF consultation report documents the process of consultation undertaken on the draft NMPF, the level of stakeholder participation that took place and presents the output of the consultation process.

Included in this comprehensive report is: legislative background context overview of the public consultation process information on the communications processes utilised to promote public awareness events participated in by the Marine Planning Policy and Legislation team over the course of the NMPF development process. graphs showing a breakdown of submission responses and categories identification of significant changes made to the draft NMPF following the public consultation, further categorising the changes as following:

  • changes to objectives
  • changes to policy
  • changes to key references
  • changes to supporting text
  • changes not made (sample comments)
  • response/reasoning for changes not made.

See Public Consultation Report here