Mr. Micheál Quinn:

I am Micheál Quinn from MB Quinn and Sons. We are located in Ballyhaunis, County Mayo. We are new entrants into the seaweed business. We are in operation approximately 12 months. Before that we manufactured wood shavings and sawdust and due to the downturn in the economy we found margins getting tighter. At that stage we had 14 full-time employees and we had to reduce staff numbers to five. We had machinery repayment commitments and we had to make a decision on what to do with our drying equipment. We set about looking at various options. We made a cautious decision to invest in more machinery to dry seaweed. We set about the change and in the past six months we have taken orders from companies in Asia and Europe. At the moment we employ ten full-time employees. We have ambitions and plans to grow our staff up to somewhere between 20 and 22 people in the next 18 months. We have orders of the magnitude of 3,500 tonnes of dried Ascophyllum at the moment. I have no gripe with Acadian Seaplants Limited buying Arramara Teoranta, and I wish it the best of luck, but my main concern is that we have people harvesting seaweed for us from north Donegal down as far as south Clare and if the option was swept from under our feet our company would be out of business and we would lose 20 employees. In the past 18 months we have invested €1.2 million in our plant without aid from anyone. The proposed change would be a total disaster for us. I have no problem with a licence being granted but it should remain with the people on the shore. Some of the documents outline that the licence is needed for the preservation of the seaweed but the people of Ireland have been harvesting seaweed for generations. If one looks back to 1947 when Arramara Teoranta was set up, if the people on the shore were not able to look after seaweed in a proper way there would not be any seaweed there today.