Mr. Michael Foley:

We will talk about the Dunmore box. It runs on the 52° line from Mine Head. It goes way east of Carnsore Point, up the east coast and into Cahore Point at 52.30°. That is the Dunmore box. It is a big area. The only thing Simon Coveney did that I agree with was that box because it excluded the larger pelagic vessels from fishing for herring and sprat within the box. Since 2012, the sprat fishery in Waterford Estuary and in the Dunmore box has come on in leaps and bounds. I have some numbers here from the Irish Marine Institute that it did while it was doing the Celtic Sea herring survey. I can show it to members later. They will see on that survey that the fish are predominantly in the Dunmore box. It is very positive but - which is even more positive - it did not do the survey in the bays and estuaries where the fish predominantly were at the time the survey was done. The institute stated it did not do that. The vessel was too big to go into the bays to do the survey. While the survey looks good, if they had been in those bays when that survey was done, it would have shown that the stocks in the Dunmore box are very good. I would say the same for the north-west sprat fishery in Killybegs. No survey was done on the east coast. The survey that was done on the south coast did not include Bantry Bay or any of the bays around the coast.

To be honest with Deputy Whitmore, I was flabbergasted when the Government put a moratorium on sprat while there was were very good and lucrative fisheries in the south east of Ireland and on the north west coast of Ireland. If there is no sprat in Bantry Bay, I do not have the answers. However, I will ask a question. Does the Deputy know how much sprat the inshore fleet took out of Bantry Bay in the past ten years?