Mr. John Menarry:

To put the inshore sector in context, we are responsible for almost 95% of the fleet and at least 65% of the direct employment. We are doing all of this with non-quota species. While it is important to say we have fair access to whitefish quotas, we uptake only approximately 5% of those quotas. We could access a lot more of the pelagic quotas but we are talking about only 2% of those quotas. As the largest sector of the industry, which provides the most onshore employment - for every one job on a boat, there are seven more ashore - we are doing all of this with 5% of the whitefish quota and 2% of the pelagic quota. If we were given fair and equal access to the quotas and the resources, which includes finance as well as flesh, we could double the size of the Irish fleet quite easily, when one considers what we are already doing with so little.

I will give an example that is not far from Deputy Ward's area. One of our members just upgraded his boat. He is young - under 30 - and he has three guys with him in the boat. That is four guys, multiplied by seven is 28, which gives 32 jobs in the back end of nowhere. If IDA Ireland or some other organisation wanted to put 40 jobs in the middle of nowhere, people would be tripping over themselves to help.

On financial supports, we heard there would be financial supports for any Irish industries affected by the US tariffs. When those tariffs started, the first thing that happened to the inshore sector was that live lobsters began to be flown from Canada to Europe to directly compete with us. Yet, the word is we are not affected by the tariffs. We were told we were not affected by Brexit but at every turnaround, we were told we could not do this or that because of Brexit. Every other sector in the fishing industry was affected by Brexit but we were told we were not affected. We are only asking for fair and equal access to all resources.