Mr. Pádraig Yeates:

One thing that has changed about the fishing industry in the last decade is that the Irish no longer work in it. I lived a lot of my life in Howth and I would have known a lot of fishing families there - ordinary fishers, not boat owners. They have all gone. They all went into the building industry and when that collapsed, they migrated. They never came back to fishing because no one in their right mind would. There was a community there, so there was a sort of limit set by the community on the level of exploitation of fishermen by skippers, because they all had to live together. Now there is a situation where there are skippers with boats, people come and go, and nobody could care less. The last people who want to antagonise the community are the gardaí. They will not antagonise the fishing boat community by doing their job and protecting fishers. That is why there is a need for some sort of outside agency to do the work.