Dr. Cecil Beamish:

In the mid-2000s, Norwegian salmon expanded very rapidly with a lot of support. There was a downturn in supply and Norway supplied the European market with below-cost salmon, which wiped out a lot of our indigenous salmon farmers. Eventually, a lot of work was done with the Commission and anti-dumping measures were taken against Norway, with a base price being set. A lot of the first-generation salmon farmers did not make it through the period. This led to a turnaround in production and since then the strategy for Irish salmon has tended to follow the organic model, with lower density and higher prices. Ireland has been the largest organic farming country and we have been able to get a premium for that. Scotland and Norway have now plateaued. Scotland has a lot more sheltered water than we have and the Norwegian coast is enormous and incomparable with ours.

While it has varied a little over the years, they have been tending to cap production of late, and Denmark has just decided to cap production. It is not just a story of unqualified onward development and it needs to be more careful than that. We are not going to be a salmon producer on the scale of Norway or Scotland at this stage.