Dr. Ciaran Byrne:

I thank Deputy Harrington for those interesting questions. I will deal with the sea angling side of it and touch on some of the other issues he mentioned. I might ask Dr. Gallagher to talk about some of the latest research on sea lice and some of the international experience on the aquaculture side of matters.

On sea angling, Deputy Harrington is correct that is it most beneficial to rural economies. There is a lot of it. When we looked at our socio-economic survey, the largest grouping is sea anglers. The person most likely to pick up a fishing rod and go fishing is a sea angler. If we put our hand on our heart and question whether we are doing enough for sea anglers, we have identified that we are probably not doing enough for sea anglers and we need to do more. In terms of our next round of the strategic plan, we will focus more on the sea angling community.

We have a marketing promotion department, including qualified angling guides who have all the various angling qualifications. We produce sea angling guides for a number of locations around the coast, which are freely available as downloads. A person can find out where there are good fishing marks, the kind of tackle and lure one should use, and the types of species one is likely to encounter. If a tourist in west Cork sees the little brown sign which reads "sea angling", we have sea angling guides in many such areas. These guides are not specific to individual locations. For example, it might be a sea angling guide to west Cork or a sea angling guide to the Shannon Estuary. The guides give an understanding of what species are available in the area concerned.