Mr. Finian O'Sullivan:

They would. They would be starting from scratch. We have to do the appropriate assessments in our case because we farm shellfish and such. People have to run through the whole system of public consultation and advertising and the appeals process through the ALAB, and then you could end up in a judicial review, so, as I said, how long is a piece of string? It just seems to me that the whole thing has become too cumbersome really, and behind that there are people who are passionate about the industry. When we started out, we were full of passion about the industry and we might not have considered the whole regulation of it too much until we were made to do so. However, I think the passion and the energy is drifting out of the industry. People just see it as too frustrating, wherein we have all the other problems around the industry. We are an island nation. We have to get our product off the island to market it and we see problems there after Brexit and all that, so there is kind of a sequence of problems in the whole thing, and the licence is an issue because we do not have the security of being there for long.

That is one of the reasons we are talking about the 20-year licence. If you get a young fella coming out of college and you are trying to coax him into the industry and he sees in ten years he could be out of business again, he is going to build his career somewhere else.