Mr. Cecil Beamish:

These are larger vessels, and Dingle was not part of the fishery harbour centres network when the 2003 order was drawn up, so the 2003 order did not cover Dingle. When Dingle was absorbed into the Department as a fishery harbour centre, but was not covered by that 2003 order, the issue arose of the foreign vessels that were largely landing into Dingle at that stage. They claimed they could not operate on the basis of the 2003 order because they wanted to pay their bill when they arrived - sell their fish, pay the bill and leave. The actual way in which the 2003 order operated was that the landed amount was returned in the logbook. It would be about a month or six weeks before that would be collated in the system, and then the bill would be generated. At this point they would be back in Spain, Norway, France or wherever. They said that they were no longer going to land into Ireland. That would be a loss of business and employment to the country. It was and remains a national policy desire to increase the number of foreign landings into Ireland; perhaps 75% of the fish that is caught in proximity to Ireland is not landed into Ireland. We could double or treble the size of our fishing industry if we could land that fish into Ireland, if we could make it attractive.