Charlie McConalogue (Donegal, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

That is not what I said at all. The point I was going on to make relates to relative stability and our national share of the European quota. The relative shares we have had of various fish stocks, on which we are engaging with other non-EU states at the moment, were set in the early 1980s under relative stability. Despite the annual battles and the reviews of the CFP that have happened since, those allocation keys have remained constant. Our shares of quotas have been constant. The big impact on our quotas since relative stability was established for most of our stocks was the Brexit impact in the past two years, which has been significant. I continue to try to have this addressed at European level. What we have also seen are changes over the years. I outlined in my submission how we have been moving at European level in recent years using the same allocation keys, and using the same relative stability percentages within member states to a situation where the vast majority of our fishing stocks were fished at unsustainable levels. We were overfishing at European level. The scientific data was not necessarily always as strong as it is now to know that was the case, but we were overfishing. Where a country is overfishing, it has a bigger quota, even though our percentage of it has always remained the same.

However, we have all been trying to move to a situation where we are fishing at a sustainable yield level so we are not taking more out than is sustainable. Deputy Cahill will know this well from a farming point of view. A farmer does not reduce his number of cows because he will have fewer calves the next year. He maintains the breeding stock at a sustainable level and does not reduce it below that level. It is easy to do at farm level where somebody owns his or her herd, and can see that. It is much harder in open seas and the fish roam all over the place. You are depending on everybody to manage it. Over the past number of years we have moved to a situation where we are trying to manage stocks at sustainable yield levels. Thankfully we have made progress on that. It is in all of our interests long term that we do fish at sustainable yield levels otherwise the stock gets eroded. We have seen that with herring. Many ports around the country were coming down with herring over the generations, like for example Downings in Buncrana in the home county of the Deputy and myself. Herring was a great industry. That fishery is now closed because it was overfished and it is now in recovery mode. We see the same with cod, which is an important stock as well. That has an impact. The quotas have not changed, but the volume of fish that can be landed has changed. A lot of this is down to sustainable yields. Some fisheries have closed because they were overfished. The other variable is what we are processing coming from other fleets, which our fish factories are always very competitive in attracting.

Turning to Brexit and the burden sharing, as the Deputy will be aware, that is something I have been adamant on over the past couple of years at European level in pointing out the unfair burden we took on as part of that. I was forthright in the negotiations in seeking to protect our national position. I worked closely with the industry in that regard. I was insistent in the engagement I had at European level. As I have said to the Deputy previously, at the time it was in the mix, there was a two and a half week period where there was not a word out of Sinn Féin regarding the ongoing Brexit negotiations and the threat to our fish. The deal-----