Dr. Cecil Beamish:

I will respond in reverse order. Senator Mulherin raised the impact, or lack thereof, of salmon farms on wild salmon. This issue has been subject to much discussion. The primary area of concern over the years has been sea lice. Sea lice, which are naturally occurring parasites in the marine environment that have been there for hundreds of millions of years, can build up on salmon farms as a host. Therefore, there is a danger of cross-infection of wild stocks. Alternatively, they may initially get the infection from wild stocks and it builds up. Ireland has a system for monitoring the level of sea lice on every salmon farm. There are 14 inspections every year on every salmon farm. Those inspections are carried out by the State and the results are put on the web and are available for anybody to see. There are trigger levels, which are at a low level by international standards. If the number of sea lice on the animals on the farm is higher than those trigger levels, a formal notice to treat all the animals on the farm is issued to bring the level below the trigger levels. This process is transparent and open. Ireland is the only country I am aware of that has fully transparent system operated by the State. In other countries, it is the operators who report.

Salmon is a food. It is grown as a food and must be safe as a food and we are concerned about that so it goes through all of the regulatory procedures that food goes through to be safe. Senator Mulherin mentioned some of the substances she thinks might be in farmed salmon. I do not think farmed salmon producers would be very happy with that. It is not the case. Norway, which is not a country known for environmental despoliation, produces 1.2 million tonnes of farmed salmon and hopes to increase that to 2 million tonnes. Scotland is growing about 160,000 tonnes of farmed salmon and Ireland has been producing about 12,000 tonnes. A figure of 12,000 tonnes relative to the Norwegian figure is 1.2 million per year so we need to keep a perspective. Almost all of Ireland's salmon farms have organic status and get a premium in the market by virtue of retaining their organic status so it is very important for them that quality is high. On the basis of the scale at which we are producing relative to competitors, they survive on the basis of going for that organic niche. They apply organic standards to that. All the other residue testing is done as well in terms of food production from those farms. We are still not producing enough to meet all the processing requirements and we still have processors importing salmon to smoke it and so forth so we are not even meeting that demand but salmon farm production is growing again. We should be very careful in respect of our statements about the organic farmed salmon we produce here, which is of internationally high quality and gets premium product on the market.

All finfish farms must carry out an environmental impact statement, EIS, before they can be licensed. Any EIS that is produced goes through a full assessment by the statutory authorities as to whether it stacks up so it is not just a case that somebody produces an EIS and nobody looks at it. It is assessed by the statutory authorities as part of the licensing process.

Forcing all salmon farming to go on shore is premature. There is a technology known as recirculating aquaculture systems that has been developed on a trial scale and involves the question of whether one would grow salmon on tanks ashore. The vast bulk of salmon grown around the world is grown in open pens at sea. Ireland has a high energy cost environment and relatively warm temperatures for salmon growing. I do not think Ireland would be the easiest place to bring in a recirculation system. If Ireland did that, it is almost certain that farms would lose their organic status and, therefore, their niche in the market. That would make them particularly uncompetitive. It is a matter for the applicant to decide-----