Mr. Enda Conneely:

I would like to address a few of the issues raised by Deputy Pringle and Senators Ó Clochartaigh and Comiskey. From our perspective, the NIFF is not specialised enough to deal with the issues specific to islands. We need a specialist approach.

The FLAG situation involves regional areas and communities. It is only funded at the present time to deal with small-scale issues. That brings us back to the islands and scale. Deputy Ó Clochartaigh mentioned the current issues peculiar to aquaculture. The agencies are using EU funding which we think should be directed towards coastal communities. The funding seems to be going to large multinational entities rather than areas of future potential. It seems to be focused on one particular form of aquaculture which we would consider to be nearing the end of its current life span.

We must be very careful about how EU funding is targeted and spent. We need to have an aquaculture industry that is of a scale suitable to islands but which also encompasses different species. We should be looking to lead the new wave that is coming in this area rather than what is happening at the moment, namely, that funding is being targeted in one particular direction.

In regard to the Common Fisheries Policy, there is a European-wide issue because islands are recognised as special cases. We have a scale issue in that we are quite small. We have been there for generations and have operated with the resources we had. There is a danger at the moment in that we need to focus in some way on retaining the ownership of, for instance, seaweed rights that we have traditionally had on the islands. Even a pilot scheme in this regard would be useful to see how we might deal with these types of issue as islands. If we had, say, a zone of control or some other mechanism that would allow us to have input into what actually happens, that would be helpful. It would not necessarily be up to the 12-mile limit, because that is a longer-term issue, but some immediate measure that would allow us to have some local management and access to earmarked resources for the islands would be a start.

Reference was made to the first salmon of the year. There are rivers in Ireland with very low salmon stocks. One option would be to look at the Alaskan model which involves restocking and a form of ranching. It is something that has not been analysed too carefully, as far as I can see, but it is an idea we could explore, especially for the Donegal islands.

Returning to the question of scale, we see in other European countries that boats can come into a small port and people can buy the fish directly off it. That is established practice all over Europe. If one goes anywhere in Italy, France or Spain, for instance, it is possible to buy top-quality fish in a local area. We are constrained by seasons and by size in that we have only a small inshore fleet, but there is scope there and it would tie in nicely with the Wild Atlantic Way initiative. The inhabited islands should be included in that initiative.