Charlie McConalogue (Donegal, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The fishers themselves had asked for those schemes. Almost all of them have availed of it in the whitefish sector. As the Senator says, they have found it to have made a positive contribution. It has made fishing and going to sea more economically viable because it has made more quota available to those who are at sea while those who are tied up for one month are able to avail of an income from the tie-up funding. The sector's representatives are asking for a further tie-up scheme for the start of next year.

That request has come forward in recent times and it is something I will consider.

The rationale and logic behind the tie-up scheme has been as an interim measure pending the decommissioning scheme. The objective behind the proposal for the decommissioning scheme is to ensure the boats that fish are viable and make a good income. The way the decommissioning scheme works is such that if boats decide not to continue, the quota they would have fished is redistributed among the remaining boats. The quota is still fished, therefore, but fewer boats fish it. I raised the example earlier of Greencastle, near my home village, where the number of fish being caught is similar to what it would have been 20 or 30 years ago, but the number of boats catching it is a lot lower and the number of fishers who work on catching it is lower because the capacity catch is much higher. It is no different from my experience growing up on a farm, or from that of the Senator, I am sure, where the machinery was much smaller, and the man hours much longer, to do the same work.

What I and the industry want is a greater quota to make our ports even more viable. That is a fight and a battle with which we will continue but, as I said, that has not changed since the early 1980s, when the percentage carve-up was decided based on the fishing activity of member states at the time. While we will continue to fight that battle at European level, the proposal is in place in regard to the decommissioning scheme to ensure that the boats that fish will have a quota that makes it economically viable to do so. Once the decommissioning scheme comes into place, the idea is that the need for the tie-up scheme will be removed because the boats that fish will have a greater quota to fish.