Mr. Patrick Murphy:

Let me use hake as an example. I am not talking about all the countries together but individual countries have around ten times our quota. I spoke to French members of fish producers organisations like ourselves at meetings in Brussels and all over. I put the proposal that I mentioned earlier about pooling our resources from the landing obligation. He told me that they had the same problem. They have producer organisations that cannot catch the fish they are allocated. We have a permanent swap situation. They are not able to catch all the fish. They would want more boats to catch what they are allowed.

Let me describe it in a simple way. Let us imagine a Spanish person, a French person and an Irish man sitting at the table and one puts food in front of each relative to the share-out of the fish. The Irish man is finished in five minutes, one cannot see the Spanish or French man because of the amount of food they have in front of them. Out comes the man from the kitchen and he brings out a teaspoon and puts a spoon of it onto the Irish man's plate. He goes back into the kitchen and gets a shovel to try to put it on top of what the other two have. That is the reality of the share-out. I was told by the head of the Sea-fisheries Protection Authority, SFPA, that more than one third, one in every three fish that is landed in Europe is caught in Irish waters. We have around 10% because we have a good share out in fairness of the mackerel and the pelagic fish. I was never trying to make a case about a them and us. It was about saving 30 boats in the whitefish sector.