Mr. Enda Conneely:

I thank the Senator. It is complicated but I will try to simplify it. The quota was allocated based on track record. If you were fishing, say, 10,000 tonnes of mackerel, you were first in line to get the quota for that. It is well established within the EU system.

The danger is you have to then buy tonnage in kilowatts. In Ireland, in theory, the quota is a public asset that is allocated by the Minister but in practice you find it is nearly de facto privatised at this stage so that there is a danger that if that quota gets attached to a vessel and when the vessels go broke or get taken over by another corporation, all those national assets could disappear off Ireland's assets. At present, there is that.

When I started off fishing, you got a boat and you caught some fish. The fish you caught were yours, the fish I caught were mine and it was a level that it could work. Since the management of it came in through the European Commission competency, they try to get large-scale things done. It is a bit like ICES's advice on the pollock. They pick a huge area with loads of different nuances within it and they just go for it. It does not really suit. What I can see with it is that it is difficult to start into the business at present and that has to be looked at again.

As against track record, I see a lot of it in the crab stuff in the North Sea where some new entrants are killing every kind of crab they get just to build up a record so that they can have themselves set up for getting whatever they think they will get out of it. You need to manage the fishery. You are fishing a finite resource. If you go into it at an industrial scale, you will kill it and it will not come back. We have issues like that at present.

I can go through the track record with the Senator again because we are on the clock here but, essentially, that is the way it works. It is very hard to get into it. It is expensive to get into this kind of stuff for anyone starting off. I do not know whether Mr. Bonner may have anything to add?