Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 21 September 2022

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine

Aquaculture Industry: Discussion

Ms Teresa Morrissey:

Yes. Most of them are dealing with shellfish or on-land trout, sea bream and that kind of production. It is a different style of production. We are dealing with Atlantic salmon, oysters and mussels mainly here. Many of them would be less than a year. Some of them could be up to two or three years with complexities.

Certainly none of them match what we have in terms of a timeframe. There is wide recognition that EU countries have a longer timeframe versus the Norway or Scotland and Iceland. On Iceland, it was mentioned earlier that the reason its production has doubled is that the Icelandic Government had prioritised the aquaculture industry as one of the country's main industries. Government policy has really backed it in the past ten years and certainly in the past five years.

The Acting Chairman asked about jobs. The 8:1 ratio, 16 indirect 2,000 direct. Those 16 indirect is the seafood industry overall, including fisheries as well as marine engineering. Seafood processing would probably be the main one that we are contributing to but we do not necessarily have that information regarding how much of that aquaculture or fisheries are responsible for. I looked for it over the past number of days and I do not think that such a breakdown exists. It is all put in together.

As for the Norwegian ownership Ms McManus might have a comment on that. There is a huge concern necessarily on that side of things for the Norwegian ownership but we have increasing concerns in the oyster industry where we see a lot of French ownership occurring. We have a lot of French oyster companies taking over Irish sites and have probably gone over the 50% threshold in that 50% of Irish oyster licenses are now probably in French ownership.

The Acting Chairman asked if we were to go to the Department in the morning how quick the process could be. There are a lot of complexities in doing assessments under the habitats directive. It is quite similar to designated land. On land as well there are certain things that have to be done, basically we have to dot the i's and cross the t's.

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