Professor Stephen Kinsella:

That is certainly one way to proceed. The way I would set it up would involve a State-owned agency that did the granting to the private sector because you want smaller companies innovating quickly, learning how to fail, moving on and consolidating. You want that innovative dynamic within it. You want some stable State agency to manage that but that agency should also do the co-ordination and planning to make sure that, for example, fisheries and fishermen's rights were being managed, that there was democratic accountability and that it was not simply a transfer of resources directly to the private sector, most importantly the foreign-owned private sector. Those are key strategic views I espouse and something with that co-ordination capacity would be vital.

I cannot overstress how extraordinary the opportunity is here. I sound like a salesman for the industry but am not. It could be transformative for the State if we were able to grasp it but it would take decades to get right; therefore, we will need some build-up of State capacity to manage that.