Mr. Michael Keatinge:

People are aware that the former practice of discarding fish has now been discontinued. That was a problem we faced for many years. Much of the catch was thrown back because it might have been undersized and there was a legal requirement to throw it back but perhaps the more difficult issue to comprehend was to be found particularly in our whitefish sector. Fishermen do not simply fish for cod; they will catch cod, haddock and whiting or when they fish for prawns they may get cod along with prawns. If they ran out of quota in one species, they kept fishing for another species and threw back big healthy fish that were dead. That is a major challenge. One of the areas that concerns us as we go into the new regime, which will come fully online in the next two years, is that we could face what are known as choke scenarios, where when, for example, we would run out of cod we would still have prawn quota.

The main area in which Bord Iascaigh Mhara, BIM, has been involved is gear technology in terms of how to develop a net that will optimise the catch to ensure that the fishermen are not faced with the dilemma that if they continue to fish the quota they have, having perhaps over-fished or exhausted their quota in cod, they will now have to leave the fishing grounds and go ashore. It has been encouraging that all the fishing organisations have rallied around this. There has been a huge new emphasis on examining how to effect that change. This approach has been taken on board and in the past two years in particular, we have looked at a range of different fisheries based particularly on their importance. We have looked at the nephrops or prawn fishery and in particular the problems we have in cod or whiting. We are now able to show that it is possible to minimise unwanted catch. It is not that the fishermen do not want the fish but if they catch them they will no longer have fish quota. We are moving towards technical solutions. It would be wrong to suggest that there will not be challenges. I think everybody agrees that the practice of discarding was inherently a problem area. Removing that practice completely causes another problem. I believe we will see a combination of the technical changes we are developing in tandem with what we will call quota uplifts where we will get additional quota to account for what we used to discard. I can see light at the end of the tunnel but the path ahead will be difficult. We have noticed that one element has changed during the past two years. We were doing technical trials for a long time but people were not buying into them. However, now the writing is on the wall and fishermen are genuinely engaging with this process. I believe we will see a way through this.