Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The Marine Institute would have observers on boats, working with fishermen to try to understand the practical complexities of the obligation to land. There will be practical complexities. I refer to the Celtic Sea, which is often used as an example because it is a good one, where fishermen are catching cod, haddock and whiting. Whiting is separate as it is a slightly different shape from cod and haddock. It will be complicated over the next three or four years to introduce an obligation to land for each of those species. We are starting with whiting, which is the easiest one to start with. There is a slightly cleaner whiting fishery in part of the Celtic Sea than for cod and haddock. The feedback from the industry and stakeholders was that whiting is the easiest of the three species to start with. That is what we are trying to do. Given what we have learned from the scientific observation this year, we will work through next year to try to do as good a job as we can on the obligation to land for whiting. We will learn lessons from that and then we will introduce another species. We will do it step by step. We will help fishermen with the cost of changing gear to become more selective. Obviously, that will impact on mesh size, the shape of nets, escape hatches and so on.

It will be quite challenging to deal with the prawn fishery, but there are known mechanisms to create a cleaner fishery, such as the Swedish grid and a number of separation systems of cod and prawns that have been used in the Irish Sea quite successfully. There are approaches that can make the problem easier to deal with. In the Celtic Sea, we increased the mesh size and we introduced technical conservation measures, which actually reduced the discard of juvenile fish by 40% in the past two years. This can be done. As a result, the stock should be healthier the following year. The whole point of this is to build up stocks.

Deputy Pringle said the de minimis rule is 7% to 8%, but to be clear, the rule is 7% at a maximum.