Charlie McConalogue (Donegal, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The challenge here is that it is like everything. In advance of an event, people are agreeable to something being shared equally, but once there is an outcome and it has different impacts on different people, it is much more difficult to get agreement on how that should be addressed. It is very hard to find fishers in other member states who are of the view that they should give up some of their fish in the same way as we always want more fish, and our fishers want more fish. That is the challenge. That is why there has not been any change in 40 years to the allocation key in the relative stability that was established back in the early 1980s. Everybody defends ardently what they have. Everybody will always be looking for more, even those who we feel have a lot more than we have. It is our job to be ardent in trying to improve our position and trying to ensure we get fair play. That is my objective in relation to the Common Fisheries Policy review. I brought the fishing representatives together to advise on how we go about doing that and to fully assess the strategy that can best achieve that. I will be taking that approach.