Mr. Donal Maguire:

To respond to some of the remarks from Deputies and Senators, from a BIM perspective, we share those aspirations entirely. I am a west Clare man. Ms Morrison is from the western isles of Scotland, so she knows more than anybody else the positive influences that can come from correctly practised aquaculture in communities.

The first point I would make is that the aquaculture industry is not just about salmon farming. Salmon farming is a very valuable part of it, but there is a lot more to it than that. We have a very successful oyster farming industry. That section is doing very well, and please God it will continue that way. We would like to see a resurgence in success, particularly in the bottom-grown mussel industry and in salmon farming.

The great aspect is that this is a market-driven sector. We just cannot get a large enough supply of raw material to give to the members of Mr. Ó Cinnéide's association and to other people. If any other sector had the same market opportunity and market pull, they would be highly envious of it. That factor of market opportunity and the fact that it will last into the foreseeable future - because of the increases in wealth we are seeing in the Asia Pacific region, the purchasing power and the desire to buy top-class Irish seafood - exists throughout Europe and the world. The question is whether we in Ireland want to come to terms with some of the difficulties required to exploit this opportunity.

Salmon farming is a very expensive business. Multinational pockets are needed to run it successfully because it is so sophisticated, but we must consider the experience in Ireland. The biggest seafood company in Ireland is Marine Harvest Ireland. It is also the biggest salmon farmer. It has been in operation for 35 years. With the exception of the managing director, who, although he has a foreign name, grew up and went to school in Ireland, every other person in that company was born and reared in their own locality. I accept that it has a profit motivation, but it has strong corporate and social responsibility values, and they are rooted in their particular locations. I am sure that is the same model the members saw replicated in Scotland. The nature of the business is that it has to be located in the community. The employment is there, and if one can get the raw material going out to the processors, it is a win-win situation that suits everybody. It is not like a situation in which someone can decide to take it away in the morning. Irish salmon or Irish oysters have to be from Ireland. If we can get over the difficulty - and many of the actions set out in the plan are designed to get over that difficulty - I have no doubt this can make a great contribution to reversing some of the trends Deputy Ferris pointed out, which are lamentable in rural Ireland. It could help to rejuvenate fortunes in some of those areas.

Also, the aquaculture side of things can be put together with inshore fishing, and it could provide a powerful engine for restoring the former abundance of stocks such as lobster, as well as other inshore fishery stocks. Done correctly, that could have a big effect.

With regard to shore-based aquaculture, as mentioned by Deputy Ferris, we studied that very carefully. There are a number of recirculation aquaculture system, RAS, projects in Ireland. Most of them are in freshwater rather than in seawater projects. The technology for RAS seawater projects is not advanced enough to be reliable as yet. A number of experiments have been done around the world but none of them have proved viable to this point. We have a number of clients looking at it. Nobody has bitten the bullet yet in terms of being prepared to invest in it, but we are very interested. As soon as we believe it is a live prospect we will jump, so to speak. It is probably more suited to lower-volume, higher-value species than to mass production of big volumes of something like salmon, but we have no preconception against it. We are doing a lot of studies and are staying very much on top of it.

On the other point raised by Senator Ó Domhnaill, ironically, the environmental worries, particularly around salmon farming, have led to the point at which applications for salmon farms are so sophisticated that the science involved just to complete the application is enormous. That makes it very difficult for local communities to be the ones bringing forward the projects. In many ways, it has become the preserve of State agencies or large multinational, but there can be many models as to how those businesses can be developed thereafter once an application is successful and if and when a licence is brought forward. We can accommodate both of those aspects, but it is worth saying that the degree of rigour and scrutiny to which a marine salmon farm licence is subjected in Ireland is extraordinary. For example, it is far easier to establish a wastewater treatment plant for a town and pump sewage into the sea than it is to get a licence for a salmon farm. The environmental impact statement, EIS, for a salmon farm is that thick in terms of size, but the EIS for a wastewater treatment plant is thicker. There is something odd about the way we are looking at some of these aspects, and that is driven by the concerns and the politics of it.

Many of the comments made with regard to this plan are not particularly for BIM, because it is the Department's plan and it is out for public consultation. We had a certain input into it.

We see that must be done to allow the full seafood operational programme to move forward. It is a technical document as much as a public document to allow the greater seafood operational programme to move forward.