The Irish Statutory Instrument 382/2010 implementing the EU INSPIRE Directive came into effect on 1 August. The S.I. is published in the Irish Statute Book of the Office of the Attorney General at http://www.irishstatutebook.ie/2010/en/si/0382.html.
The S.I. is 12 pages long and follows the text and requirements of the DIRECTIVE 2007/2/EC OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL of 14 March 2007 "establishing an Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community (INSPIRE)" very closely, especially in regard to definition of 'public bodies' and 'spatial data', 'spatial data sets' and 'spatial data services' - which have ramifications on who must implement the administrative and technical aspects of the Directive, and to which data sets and services the Directive applies within those authorities.
An important derogation from compliance with the Directive relates to public bodies 'operating at the lowest level of government' for which spatial data sets need not to be INSPIRE compliant "only if laws or regulations require their collectoin or dissemination" - a clause direct from the Directive itself.
In Ireland, the 'lowest level of government' may be that of municipalities, although this has not yet been confirmed from our sources.
One special clause in the S.I. relates to the border with Northern Ireland:
"(3) In order to ensure that spatial data relating to a geographical feature, the location of which spans the frontier between the State and the United Kingdom, are coherent, public bodies shall, where appropriate, decide by mutual consent on the depiction and position of such common features."
Public bodies that are required to create metadata for the 13 data themes in Annex I and II of the Directive have until 23 December 2010 to create such metadata according to the already established INSPIRE Metadta EC Regulation - "COMMISSION REGULATION (EC) No 1205/2008 of 3 December 2008 implementing Directive 2007/2/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council as regards metadata" availablehere.