Mr. Paschal Hayes:

I can certainly have a go at the first part of the Vice Chairman's question but, like him, I am puzzled as to why it was not picked up and acted on. The bigger picture is as I outlined earlier, that is, that we have a number of fish stocks off our coast. We are lucky to have the richest fishing grounds in Europe. Those stocks are assessed scientifically to establish what the outtake from them can be. That sets a limit and feeds into the quota management, which is the business of the Minister. Quotas are distributed and vessels go out to fish. That is where the SFPA comes into this. Vessels go out, they fish those stocks, they land and we meet them at the quayside. Nineteen out of 20 of them will go to the factories and will weigh what they have there. I am talking about bulk pelagic fisheries now: mackerel, horse mackerel, herring and blue whiting. Nineteen out of 20 will go straight to the factory because we have a control plan in place that allows for weighing in the factory. On the basis of those 19 landings going to the factory, one out of 20 has to be weighed under our supervision at the pierside. Those fish are transported in bulk tanks containing refrigerated seawater that is chilled down to preserve the quality of the fish. The vessel pulls up to the quayside and those fish get pumped into the pierside device, which is, to all intents and purposes - I am sure Deputy Mac Lochlainn has seen it - a hopper and a conveyor belt system that carries the fish up the conveyor. As he pointed out, there is a facility to weigh on it, a continuous belt weigher. In option 1 we do not use that weighing facility; we just use the conveyor portion of it to convey the fish into a tanker that is waiting under that machine and that has been pre-charged with refrigerated water and weighed on a weighbridge, so we have a weight for the tanker and the water. The fish is added and the tanker with the water and the fish goes back over the weighbridge again. It is weighed again. One weight is subtracted from the other to give a very accurate weight for the fish. The fish then go to the factory for processing.