Mr. John Lynch:

When the Minister of State was appointed, we welcomed him and his ambition for more and better engagement. That has evolved into the establishment of this fisheries committee, which we very much appreciate. We look forward to engaging with it as much as possible. We intend to come in as often as the committee requires us to answer questions and inform members.

The survey shows the truth of an industry in decline and in trouble. Whether it is how people feel or how things actually are is irrelevant. The industry is in a very low place and has been on the way down for a number of years. Three things that have driven it down more quickly were Brexit, Covid and the fuel crisis. Those things have happened and our job is to work to alleviate and try to rebuild.

We are looking towards a future of fuel transition where we will have to achieve more efficiencies with an ageing fleet. That is impossible. We have to look into a fleet rebuilding programme involving a more effective, cleaner, more modern fleet to meet the State's and world's ambitions for carbon neutralisation. That is a given. It has to be done.

Previous to those events, when a fisherman had a bad year, week or month, he had the opportunity, because the fish were available to him within quota, to fish a little bit harder to make up the gap. That was the resilience we had but now we do not have that resilience. If he does not take his opportunity within a month or year, he have lost that opportunity. He cannot regain it. He can only catch what is allocated to him the next year or month. There is no opportunity to build resilience in a business in the fishing industry. That is what kept the industry going up to now but that resilience or those reserves are now gone and it has gone into negative figures for most operators in the catching sector and possibly in businesses upstream and downstream from that sector.

As my colleague said, we have to recognise we are in a bad place but we also have to engage and work together to achieve a better proposition for the seafood industry, to modernise and to maintain those 17,000 coastal jobs, which I believe are irreplaceable. No other industry will come in and replace 17,000 jobs around the peripheral coastline of Ireland. We need to rebuild and maintain jobs both onshore and on the islands, as Deputy Ward said. We need to be all-inclusive, rebuild for everybody and build a modern, sustainable fishing industry for the future.