Ms Tara McCarthy:

I thank all the members for wishing me luck in my new role. We would agree with all the members in saying that Brexit is the biggest single challenge facing our industry. That was why we circulated the map as part of this discussion because it shows the UK waters where we would traditionally have had complete open access and a hard Brexit would mean we would not have that access. That is the most startling part of this issue. Most of the food industry is talking about the effect of Brexit and access to the market. From a fishing perspective it is more complex because it affects access to fish. It is almost a double whammy. Our role in the discussions on this is to understand its economics. The Marine Institute will map and build the likely scenario for the stocks. We then work on the economic effect of those stocks. There may be 1,000 tonnes of stock but there is a big difference between a stock worth €1 a tonne and one worth €1,000 a tonne. We also consider what stocks are important to us and which are important to the UK. It would have been our ally in negotiations but that scenario is different now. All we can do is build scenarios at the moment. We can map the information flows and build negotiating positions that would be dealt with at a Heads of State level. We will contribute to informing each member of those negotiations.

The statistics behind safety at sea are positively frightening. The industry is much more dangerous than agriculture and the construction industry. That is not a boast, it is a fact that we had to consider. Our campaign was small and low budget but we tried to get to the truth of why a fisherman does not wear a safety jacket because it would seem illogical not to. We learned that there is a perception that if the sea is going to take a fisherman, it will take him and if he falls into the water he is a goner. A good fisherman does not fall into the water. That was the battle we had in discussing this with fishermen. We tried to tell them we were not trying to insult them by saying they must wear life jackets because they are not good but we asked them to live to tell the tale by wearing the life jacket. We listened to the terrible stories we heard from fishermen's families. When the body is lost nothing can move in respect of the will for that family for seven years because the bank accounts cannot be accessed. We tried to play on the responsibility of the fisherman to live and tell his tale. We learnt a great deal by using real fishermen who had fallen into the sea, not actors but people who could tell the story that resonated with the fishermen. We are continually building the story behind it and are working out how to repeat it.

We are looking at avenues such as the Skipper Expo which we will revisit in March. We had it as our highlight at the SeaFest in July. We are trying to appeal to the broader communities to make everybody aware that wearing a life jacket is a must and the equivalent of wearing a safety belt when driving a car. We have quite a degree of work and communication to do on that and we are still working on the development phases of it.

I am probably going back and forth on the Brexit issue. All arrangements are being examined as we build scenarios, whether it would be an Norwegian arrangement, whether it would be negotiated every year and what the likely negotiation positions would be, but the key stark fact is that English fishermen are communicating that seafood should be seen as the calling card or benchmark of success of Brexit, such that if they win in the seafood industry, then Brexit was right. They are building their profile as well as a very emotional argument with the public in the UK to make the case that a win that everybody can benchmark is if they completely win all access to fish in their waters for themselves. When we are dealing with that as an opening position across the table from us, all we can do is build cases and scenarios behind that to ensure that on our side of the debate fisheries is in no way seen as not being important and that it should also have a high profile. It is by showing graphs like this that we can build it into everybody's agenda that fisheries has to be fought for at a very hard level on our side.

In the context of market breakdown, the UK is our industry's number two market for exports after France. It is an important market for us but there is quite a diversity in our market profile in fish. Unlike in the wider food industry where the UK accounts for 42% of our total exports, while it is our industry's number two market, it is at a lower level. We have companies that would be very dependent on that market, but the difference in seafood is that often much of those exports are sold to spot auctions rather than being tied into retail contracts that would be in place in, say, the mushroom industry or the beef industry. That means there is much greater flexibility when there are issues with sterling or with market access.

Regarding the import opportunity, it is quite specific to seafood in that what we import, for the most part, is salmon, of which we do not have an Irish quantity. We produce Irish organic salmon but often when we look at the supermarket shelves we see our consumers are buying non-organic salmon, which is imported. It is challenging to see a win opportunity completely for that in the shorter term. I will pass over to my colleague, Mr. Michael Keatinge, to deal with the land obligation.