Dr. Stephen Hynes:

That is due to the way in which we define marine economic activity, which is any activity that either uses the sea as an input or is producing something for marine-related activities. There could be someone in Tipperary, for example, who is producing navigation instruments or there could be an engineering firm in Roscommon which is involved in the marine area. One does not have to be on the coastline to be involved in marine economic activity. Obviously, though, such activity is mainly concentrated along our coast.

Other areas of activity within our unit that are of relevance to this committee include the work of my colleagues in developing an input/output analysis of the different marine sectors. My colleagues are extracting data for the marine sectors from the national input/output tables produced by the Central Statistics Office to gauge the multiplier effect of marine-related activities. We have also been looking at financial models for the aquaculture and fish farm production sectors. The unit has been examining the marine recreation demand of the Irish public.

A lot of this data has already been used in the development of the integrated marine plan launched by the Government last year. Also, the initial economic assessment had to be carried out as part of the overall assessment needed for the marine strategy framework directive and we have been working with the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government on that. As part of that work, we conducted a survey to assess the attitude of the general public to the marine environment and to get some indication of the marine recreational activities they undertake. It is quite obvious that almost everyone surveyed would probably take a trip to the coast to take a walk along a beach but our study showed that participation in on-water activities is very low. It is interesting to note that those who do participate in on-water activities can be broken into distinct groups. Those who undertake passive activities will only undertake one such activity per trip, whereas those engaged in more active activities tend to do a few activities during any trip to the coast. That is interesting in terms of clustering activities in the context of promoting tourism in certain areas. Certain activities can be clustered together successfully.

We were also involved in the report prepared by Inland Fisheries Ireland on angling, which is due to be published shortly. We were involved in the preparation of the questions and in some of the analysis contained in that report. We also do a lot of work on what can be referred to as non-market marine ecosystem services.