Mr. John Lynch:

There are several aspects to this. We are looking at what can be done to improve the situation of the fishing industry and the seafood industry as a whole. An item high on the agenda at the moment is the ongoing negotiations with Iceland. We think that the maximum value for Ireland should be extracted from the negotiations. This is a way of partially rebalancing the losses that were made in Brexit, particularly in the pelagic sector. In the demersal sector, now that we have maintained the same level of quota transfer to the UK and the TCA, one of our main opportunities is the ongoing evaluation of the CFP. We are asking our Minister and the Government to push for some reforms to be made to the CFP. In this, we would like to see reforms of the Hague preferences and of underutilised quota. There are several things within the CFP mechanism that we would like to see reformed. We would really like to see our Hague preference, which were hard fought for by Ireland, being given a stronger legal basis in the CFP. Currently, we have to go annually and fight for the Hague preferences. Reference was made earlier in one of the statements that in a certain area, 7fg, of the Celtic Sea, we are particularly deficient in quotas for sole. We do have a Hague preference in this stock, but we have never managed to invoke it and there is an issue with us trying to do so with the Commission annually at the December council. We would like to see that given a stronger legal basis.