Dr. Paddy Gargan:

I understand now. We monitor the level of adult females with sea lice. The treatment trigger is lower in the spring when wild fish are going to sea. On an average female with egg strings, the range is from 0.3 to 0.5 as opposed to 2.0 for the rest of the year. In the critical period in the spring, there were farms that were ten times over the treatment trigger. The issue we have is that they may have been breaching the trigger for four or five months in a row. The sanctions that are available were not being brought in.

There are particular locations with repeat offenders who are not maintaining lice levels below the trigger in the protocol, which is a condition of the licence. When it is breached, we do not think the sanctions are sufficiently strenuous.