Mr. Michael Desmond:

The main reason young people are not entering in the fishing industry is that they do not see a future in it or more importantly believe they will not make as much money out of it as used to be the case. Thirty years ago, I was getting £3 a kilo for velvet crab and you now get €3 per kilo. On any supermarket shelf in Ireland or throughout Europe, all that can be seen is shellfish that was farmed in Asia in very questionable water quality at the very least. It is far cheaper than ours. I do not know what checks are there. The packaging labels contain pictures of an Irish county, an Irish lighthouse or some geographical area in Ireland, but on the back it can be seen that it is from Cambodia, Vietnam or wherever.

Lately I have seen on one so-called Irish product "From Thailand and-or India". If they do not know what country this food came from, how do they know what kind of fish farm it came out of? We believe the reason the price for Irish shellfish has dropped so much is that we cannot compete against this inferior product. However, Irish processors have been given tens of millions of euro from the Irish State to help them with Covid, Brexit, etc. What do they go and do with the money? They import thousands of tonnes of foreign fish. The biggest fish ports in Ireland now are Cork Airport, Dublin Airport and Belfast. Every single thing in our supermarkets is coming from them. I have even seen scallops from Australia and mussels from Chile. Prawns are all from India, Thailand or wherever. That is what we are up against. We just cannot compete with that and people do not know the difference between the health of what we are producing, which is wild produce caught from non-polluted waters, and this stuff. It is also giving us a bad name because it is not very good when it is eaten. It would be a start to find out why Irish processors do this. There should be a campaign by the State to encourage people to buy an Irish product so that we would actually get a price for our fish again and that might lead to an upturn.

We are talking about the privatisation of a quota. Previously somebody buying a boat could see a future where they might buy the next boat because they knew they would be allowed to fish for mackerel and other fish. However, now if they buy a boat, all they can fish for is shellfish for the rest of their lives. What is the purpose of that when there is only X amount available?