Mr. John Menarry:

The Department never engaged. It has been asked to engage several times and just point-blank will not. Everybody is being told to go into a room to sort it out. As the Senator said, the big guys have it all and we have nothing. The Department are expecting us to come along and to get together. It is up to the Minister and his officials to be the referee and put it right.

Regarding the pelagic share, all we want is for it to go back to the way it was before the policy changed in 2012 and 2017. It was taken off the inshore sector. We are not looking for something that was never available to us. We only want what was available to us before. We have always stated the case that at the end of the year, if it is not caught then it should go back into the pot and be shared out again next year. It is not that fish is going to go to waste or anything like that. When we are talking about 2%, 3%, or 4% of the mackerel quota, in 2023 there was 140,000 tonnes of pelagic species available to Ireland. The inshore sector had access to approximately 2,000 tonnes out of 140,000 tonnes. We are not talking about massive numbers.