Dr. Greg Forde:

I am conscious that we are under a little time pressure.

I was asked whether better grant aid should be provided for better equipment. The industry should be required to ensure it uses the best available equipment. The idea of having a fund to recover costs is that, as with all of these types of issues, when something goes wrong in a private industry, the State ends up carrying the can. Perhaps the fund could be a portion of the licence fee or something like that, although the licence fees are not substantial.

We are aware that there were significant concerns that the 200,000 fish which escaped in Bantry Bay would end up in local rivers. As to whether we were in a position to go out and ensure they did not run the rivers, we were not in a position to do so. Luckily for the time of the life cycle, the fish probably dispersed in the sea or were crushed by the nets during the catastrophic collapse of the cages. We got out of jail, as it were, but who is to say it will not happen again? For many years, farmed fish have been turning up in the wild, which is not good from a genetic or stock resilience point of view.