Ms Caroline Bocquel:

There is a lot of work to be done regarding the social licence of salmon or what one might regard as the level of trust that exists. We have started a formal programme on that this year. We have a couple of initiatives that have been very successful. We have an aquaculture remote classroom that goes around the country and teaches children - mostly in coastal communities but not exclusively - about the impact of aquaculture, how positive it is for their communities, where the food comes from and the benefits for their local communities. It has been an overwhelming success. There are 500 schools on the waiting list for the vehicle. We have other programmes such as Taste the Atlantic where we work with 21 producers along the coast. This started off as a programme to build trust among the local community. It involved inviting members of the local community, visitors and tourists to see their farms, do a farm tour and go out on boats to understand how they were farming responsibly in a very sustainable way. They also had food offerings there. They are hugely successful for those businesses. In addition to building that trust, they are finding that it is also a very good revenue stream.

Having said all of that, there is a lot more that we need to do. Over the course of the past year, we have been developing a formal programme, which we will discuss with industry and all of the other stakeholders mentioned by Ms Morrissey earlier, to look at a systemic approach to how we can tackle this at a national level. It is not a question of BIM being able to do it on our own. We need to do it collaboratively. We have some very good initiatives that have been very positive but we believe that if we look at some of the models from other countries, and we have taken some of the learnings from international best practice, there are some very good models out there regarding how we can move this along at pace. That is a significant priority for us for 2026.