Mr. Micheál O'Mahony:

I, too, am heartened by the Senator's passion, which we share. We believe we do more in this area than many people. We spend our days and nights on it. We do not have 100% control over this area. We have only risk-based controls. We are not on the deck of any fleet every day of the week. We have defined windows of insight into what happens. We do not have 100% control. That is not how the European regulations are set up. Starting from that point, we do the best we can with what we have. We cannot offer cast-iron guarantees.

In regard to the Senator's proposal, what would be required in terms of staff is six fisheries officers, with two officers on board over three shifts to deal with daily catches which are processed during the night. As mentioned earlier, we have 61 officers to cover the entire Irish EZ and all our food safety controls.

I have just used up 10% of them without any kind of downtime for them on one vessel in the past five minutes while I have been speaking. This is an immense resource draw. There are various things we could do to tighten the loop here but that is a jump towards 100% control or total control, depending on the phrase one picks. That is not how the control regulation is set up, which is around risk-based controls. I am not pushing it back, I am just contextualising it as to where it sits.