Mr. Finian O'Sullivan:

I thank the Senator for his support in those areas, because it is something that has never been addressed. We can suffer on if we have problems. Financially we try to keep going and get going again the next year. The title of this meeting is "Aquaculture Innovation and Development". We, or I, have not spoken about innovation as such. We have spoken about lack of development but this is just to say the industry has innovated down the years. It definitely is the case in the salmon industry where people now control their feeding from satellites so the fish get fed every day and are not hampered by bad weather. They can control the whole thing. I have seen a hub in Castletownbere where they have a wall full of monitors and they can see the fish above and below the water and can control the whole thing. The thing about aquaculture is that it is not confined to salmon or shellfish. There is a scheme involving multitrophic aquaculture, which is a combination of finfish, shellfish, algae and so on. It has the least environmental impact. It has good control over the water. There are opportunities there. The whole potential of algae and seaweeds has not been explored at all in this country. There is a lot of work being done in laboratories around extracting compounds that can be good for creating diabetic medicines and stuff like that. There is a lot that can go on there in a smaller scale. When I look at other countries such as Spain and Galicia, they are probably growing 300,000 tonnes of shellfish. We do not need to be on that scale. I am aware that our coastline is difficult, especially the west coast, but there is always some place for shelter. When we started out, the first five years we were wiped out because our gear was wrong. We developed better mooring systems and growing systems. We changed over to continuous rope and moved away from plastics. We reduced the plastic content of our mediums for growing shellfish by 90%. We use biodegradable cotton and reuse the rope. We are using the same continuous rope for over 20 years. We are conscious of not using up world resources and keeping away from plastics.

For example, in the beginning if our floats were damaged they were dumped. That was 20 kg of plastic that was going somewhere for recycling. We now repair them. We learned how to weld them and stuff like that. We passed that information around the country to other producers. We are in a circular economy really. When we talk about aquaculture, we are not confining it to just shellfish or finfish. There are other opportunities there. It is happening in other countries. A couple of years ago I looked up videos of algae production for China. As far as the eye can see they are growing algae, which goes into the supermarkets and the video shows all the different products they have. We have the technology. We have the intelligence in this country and the education to develop those industries more and to micromanage them into medicines and pharmaceuticals. That is all I wanted to say because it might seem we have neglected innovation, but we are continuously innovating.