Dr. Ciaran Byrne:

No. We would have asked a board member to attend if we had known this matter would arise. Perhaps we could come back and have some members of the board accompany us.

In terms of governance, we have taken an internal audit of the NSAD. We have also done an internal review of the NSAD to see whether the strategy works and whether we need to do anything differently. One of the fundamental issues that we are facing is that the funding we received for the NSAD is capital funding. No matter what way one dresses that up, this money has to be spent on capital works because if we did not spend it on capital works, I would have to come before the committee to answer a different question.

The works on habitat enhancement to which the Chairman referred are operationally funded works. The old fisheries was a manpower based organisation. IFI has a significant funding deficit. The entirety of our own resources and income will pay the deficit in non-pay funding. We now have a €2.6 million annual funding deficit in our pay resources. We do not have enough money to keep current staff and we are effectively trying to borrow the family silver to do that work. That has direct current impacts on the kind of work we can do on the ground in terms of operational funding. We would absolutely love it if a tranche of money came to IFI through the NSAD to do operational works. That would mean a scheme could open along the lines that Ms Campion has identified and would allow habitat work to be done.

As I am sure members are well aware, things have changed. Sometimes in our frequent discussions with stakeholders one is brought back to another time because we all think the times were great back then. We all think things were great in the past. To take the example of Lough Corrib in the past number of years, we lost char from the lake in 1995, there is extensive development around its banks, roach have been introduced, lagarosiphon has been recorded and there is eutrophication of the lake. Lough Corrib as we know it from our memories was what we term a cold, clear oligotrophic lake, which was pretty much entirely composed of salmonidae. It had salmon, trout and eels, and back in the 1950s it had perch and pike and that was pretty much it. Now there is a fairly decent supply of coarse fish and because the climatic and environmental conditions have changed in the lake there are significant populations of roach in that lake. It is changing the dynamic of the lake. These are things that we probably cannot stop. This is linked into the question on climate change and warming.

One of the subsystems of Lough Corrib is the Owenriff system, which some of the Chairman's constituents have also mentioned. For considerable periods last summer, we were recording temperatures in the mid-20s in the Owenriff system. Salmon and trout are cold-water species. We also have cool-water and warm-water species. Temperatures in the mid-20s are pretty much lethal to cold-water species. That is an example of the changes we are seeing on the lake. Inland Fisheries Ireland, of its own volition, took a leadership role in respect of lagarosiphon. The western and central boards said that the presence of lagarosiphon was an issue. The Chairman has probably seen the before and after pictures of Rinneroon Bay. We managed that programme on a shoestring. We kept at it. We borrowed and begged for money to keep the show going. Even though we still do not have statutory powers, we are still doing this because we think it is important. We are contributing to the development of the lake. We are not doing so in the way that many of the stakeholders want because we are not operating in the same environment.