Dr. Cecil Beamish:

It is hard to give an answer to that but it should be comparable. I do not see why it would be greatly different. Scotland is not working under a European Court of Justice negative judgment, at least at this point it is not. Perhaps it will not be going forward. That is the unique circumstance in Ireland.

Senator Mac Lochlainn raised the issue that we have development reports for aquaculture, and we absolutely do. We have a national sustainable development strategy for aquaculture. We have a whole series of schemes in place to support the development of aquaculture under the European Maritime and Fisheries Fund, EMFF, in the Department. We do both regulatory and developmental work within this. We have the Food Wise 2025 targets. We can see no contradiction between having a sustainable licensing system, which is fully compliant and which will be a marketing asset and so on to the industry, and assisting the industry in selling internationally. We have oyster products going to China and we have a whole lot of aquaculture products going around the world to 80 or so markets. It is a very international business in Irish products. If one looks at the price of Irish farmed salmon, we were getting maybe €6.50 per kilo in 2016, although it is probably higher now. Norway is held up as being a great example in terms of aquaculture but the Norwegians were getting about €4 per kilo while the Scots were getting about €5 per kilo. It is a high quality product and it has development potential.

As these licences are completed, another quid pro quois that people get full access to all the support funding. Under the ECJ judgment, that was limited until one got the licensing system in place. The funds in the EMFF programme have been back-loaded to take account of this, so that if all of the licensing backlog is cleared over the next 24 months, then everybody will have access to all the funding arrangements which will be back-loaded.

In terms of the licences and the ability to update, anyone can ask for an amendment to the licence.

The legal responsibility on the Department is to respond to the application that it gets, and it is driven by what it is legally supposed to be doing under the legislation. The consideration is on the basis of what somebody applies for. If somebody has a licence and wants to change that licence, they can apply under the legislation to do so. If it is a material change to the licence, then they must go through public statutory consultation because things one does in the marine environment and things one does on the foreshore impact on other people.

Deputy Kenny brought up the case of a person who found that the oyster ground that had been licensed was not very productive and they wanted to move. They can apply to move but it must go through the statutory public consultation process because other people may have an interest in the area of the foreshore to which they may want to move. They are not precluded from applying for change, but the change must go through the whole process.

There is an awful lot of transparency in this report. Every step in the licensing process is set out in flow charts in the back of the report. I was asked a question on the six-month timeline. The flow charts in the report, which were prepared by the Department, explain to people that the steps in the process are all legally required steps in the legislation under which we must operate. Each of those steps has a legal obligation, a legal timeline, etc., that one has to work under. It sets out how one moves through the process, if it is a material change.

Under the Irish system, people do not own the foreshore, they simply lease it from the State. It is publicly-owned property. If they want to move to a different piece of foreshore, there has to be consideration that other people have interests in that issue.