Ms Caroline Bocquel:

Notwithstanding all the challenges, there is a lot of innovation in the sector. I spoke earlier about some of our innovations on the finfish side but we are also involved in a number of innovations within the oyster sector. One of the challenges the industry has is the fact that quite a significant amount of the oysters we grow in Ireland are small. They are called twos and threes. They are small-sized oysters for which the market has all but disappeared. What we do grow in Ireland and grow it more successfully than any other country in Europe are the large oysters called speciale oysters. These oysters are a beautiful teardrop shape with a very high meat content and there is an enormous - almost unlimited - market for them. What we have been doing is looking at the innovations we can bring to allow producers who cannot currently grow them to grow them. We have been working with industry on this. We have been on a few foreign trips with the industry to see various technologies and have identified three technologies that are very successful and that we can work with producers to put on their farms to grow these speciale oysters. This is a really important innovation we are doing, one that has been adopted by a number of our clients and operators and has allowed them to access markets for which there is very significant demand. These sorts of innovation we are doing are very important across the sector.

In our aquatech sector, we are looking at lots of different innovations. We are coming at that from a slightly different perspective. We are looking in particular at companies that have traditionally serviced the fishing sector. If we look at Killybegs, for example, we have Cahir Engineering, which would have done a lot of engineering solutions; Swan-Net Gundry with nets; and Sea Quest, which does water pumps. We support them through our aquatech programme to service the growing global aquatech and aquaculture sector. For example, we brought 12 Irish companies to Aqua Nor in Norway in August with Enterprise Ireland. As a result of that engagement, the vast majority of them secured contracts to service the growing global aquatech sector. We are looking not only at innovating physically on the farms, but at how these companies can innovate to meet new market demands.

Regarding what we are doing in terms of third level, we have been engaging with the South East Technological University and UCD, both of which are keen to run master's programmes in aquaculture. We are exploring that with them. These things take a bit of time to develop but they are certainly two organisations that are very keen to work with us.

In terms of research and development, the Marine Institute is the agency with responsibility for marine research generally. BIM does a very small amount of applied research, so we work very closely with it. It has a fellowship scheme under which we have engaged a number of fellows to look at areas of particular interest to the industry in an applied way through the Marine Institute scheme, so that is a very good partnership.

Regarding the development of various species, there are a lot of challenges with that. It is very difficult to introduce a non-native species to the coast but where we can look at that opportunity is in the on-land system through circulating aquaculture systems. We are just about getting to the point where we feel some of these systems are starting to look like they could be commercially viable. There are a lot of systems that are in test globally. There are some in Norway, Denmark and further afield. They are looking at lots of different species such as salmon, turbot and shrimp. However, they are not yet at the point where they are commercially viable. The running costs are enormous and they have a critical point of failure if they were to lose power, so they are not quite commercially there, but it is likely that they will start to be viable over the next couple of years.

Certainly, that is where would see the opportunity to look at new species, particularly warm water prawns, which are the second most consumed seafood species in Ireland. There is a potential opportunity for us to look at that.

Páirc na Mara is a project stewarded by Údarás na Gaeltachta. We do not believe there is any change in the status of that at the moment. I think it has resubmitted an amended planning application for the project. That is something we would be keen to support.