Mr. Patrick Murphy:

If an island population cannot fish it, they can let it go dead so that it goes back into the pot as, Ms Parke said earlier. There were 450 tonnes of mackerel allocated to smaller boats, which they can catch by line or by jigging, but only half is used in the year. I am asking if the 1% can be dedicated to the island. If the fish do not swim in the area, it is no good if 1% of fish can be caught around the islands. Does one swap it for 1% of the fish inside and where one can fish 2%?

There are huge complications and there is a misconception about how fish are allocated in this country. It is allocated by boat size and once a person has a licence and is under 55%, that person can get one third or a half of what the boats in the larger section catch. We go through all the stocks each month and see what fish were caught in the previous two years and we use knowledge of our own vessels to work out how many will participate in a fishery in the next month. We try to allocate the crumbs on that basis so that the boats can stay fishing. That is how hard it is for Ireland to give out fishing allocations to different vessels. If vessels do not catch their allocation, it goes back into the pot for the following month and we go through the same process again.

I have a fishing licence and a small boat and I can catch up to 55% of my category, the same as everybody else. I choose which fish I catch and where and how I catch and land them. The licence for lobster is a P licence because we had no track record when we looked for a licence for lobster fishing. Back in 1985, there was no drive to license vessels under 12 m so there was an awful lot of boats which were fishing but were never licensed by the State and never logged onto the European register. Some 410 of these boats are in existence today with only a non-quota species licence, that is, for crab and lobster. There is no management structure for the licence so a person who lives on an island can put out 200 pots, catch that species of fish and land them. If a lobster boat licence or a licence for inshore potting is restricted, the fishermen may then be excluded from that fishery. My boat can catch any species of fish that is allocated based on the monthly allocations up to a maximum of 50% of that caught by the boats in the larger segment.