Ms Caroline Bocquel:

Regarding the salmon companies, I am keenly aware of the company the Deputy is speaking of. I have been working very closely in trying to support it. One of the things we are proposing as part of our estimates campaign for next year is that we look at an insurance scheme across the sector.

The challenge that the aquaculture sector has, and particularly the finfish sector, is that with one bad storm or one bad invasion of jellyfish, three years of production can be wiped out. That is unfortunately what we saw recently. We would like to see now some support in relation to an insurance scheme that can help to provide a buffer for those companies. This is something that we are working closely on with the support of the Department to see if that can be delivered for the sector in 2026. We would be very keen on that. Certainly if there are any companies that are suffering loss we spend quite a bit of time with them trying to understand how we can support them. There will have been companies that came quite close to the brink over the past few years that we worked with and helped to put them back on the right track. We provide whatever supports we possibly can.

On the question of financing trade missions, the marketing piece is obviously with Bord Bia and it does those overseas trade missions. Through Mr. Donnelly's team we are bringing groups to different international destinations every couple of months to look at practices. We brought fishermen up to Scotland, for example, to see the way very high-quality catch was treated and how we can replicate that. Through the Foyle Co-op now all of the vessels in the co-op are participating in that high-quality scheme. Similarly, as I mentioned earlier, we are looking overseas at various technologies.

We are very keen to learn, as the Deputy said in the past, and we learned a lot from Norway and from Scotland. We are very keen to learn from our international neighbours. We have very good connections and relationships with them to be able to provide the industry with the access they need. We get very good uptake on that. I will turn to Dr. Jackson on the boarfish question.