Mr. Enda Conneely:

My name is Enda Conneely. I am based on Inis Oirr in the Aran Islands. I will address some of the points that came up and on which I made notes.

I started fishing in a currach in the 1970s. There were approximately 30 people fishing on the island then. A community lived off that. At that time, we could catch cod, haddock, ling, sole -, all the flatfish. You name it, it was there. That is not the case any more. We certainly did not kill them all because we did not have the capacity to do that. Something has happened. The point came up earlier that the landings have gone down consistently since the CFP came in and competency passed to the Commission. I have fished in the United States too where there is a different regime in place. The area I fished in was very well regulated and people with very big sticks came along to tell us we could not do and what we should not do, and, generally. we did not do it.

The quota is available but islanders do not take advantage of them, specifically that relating to mackerel. Theoretically, 450 tonnes of line-caught mackerel were available to the inshore sector. If we looked into the white fish quota and how much of that has been taken up by the bigger fleet we would see issues there too.

Some of the people who fish on the islands are not fully aware of the existence of this quota and we are restricted by weather and the market. Once we have access to a quota, this cannot be redressed overnight. This Bill is a step. There may be flaws in it that have been pointed out, for example, how quota is a public facility to be distributed by the Minister, for the maximum good of most people. To judge from what our colleagues who spoke earlier said, that does not seem to be the case. The quota seems to find its way to the bigger operators. We are stuck in this area on islands with this idea of scale, which is another problem.

The question of the islanders who had the first refrigerated seawater, RSW, boat and got the biggest boat on the fleet came up earlier too. One factor they all had in common was that when the 50 footers came in during the 1950s and 1960s, they had to leave the islands. If people got big boats, they had to leave the island. People chose not to go in that direction and fished the smaller boats. That is generally the form. If people scale up, they leave. We do not want to do that. We are trying to keep an island community. The fishing opportunities are allocated by the Minister. They are not ours but are granted to us. We have structures in place to deal with this because ours is a member-based organisation. We have input into the advisory councils that are part of the CFP system because we are on the transparency register. If we do get access to this we are in the process of setting up a producer organisation for our system. This is a question of scale and we are small. If people scale up, they leave the island. We do not want to do that.

In response to the question about unfairness to our neighbours, I am from Inis Oirr, which is very close to Inis Meáin and Inis Mór and to the people in Doolin in County Clare. We have worked with them and find that the inshore sector in Doolin is also restricted to non-quota species. That is the way it seems to have developed. This would go a step towards reversing that. The suggestion of an equitable system sounds very good.

In our interaction with it, the Commission pointed out that the allocation of quota was an issue for the member state. In Ireland, it is up to the Minister. He could decide this year to allocate X amount of quota to the island fishing boats. The boats we are talking about are generally small, under 12 m, many are 5 m, 6 m or 7 m. They would be in the polyvalent general register in any event. They are on the islands. This would facilitate their getting involved a managed fishery and area because if everyone is stuck with crab and lobster it will not support everybody. There are no restrictions coming in on non-quota species.

We are also looking at the marine strategy framework directive which is coming down the line, and at spatial planning. We would be very interested in co-management. On Inis Oirr we work with Queen's University Belfast and the Marine Institute. We have worked with the Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology, GMIT. We are doing a v-notching scheme for lobster that traces the genetics of the lobster. We are into the seventh or eighth year of that scheme. It is important for managing the lobster fishery but we need to have some kind of management structure in place for that. The islands and the people living there have to have an input into that. One of the points made earlier was that some members of the big organisations were from islands but while they are still connected to their roots on the islands they are not living on the islands because once they scale up they have to leave. Inis Mór was slightly different in that it had better harbour facilities.

Concern was expressed that this would prevent the development of the industry on islands in some way but this Bill has created so many red herrings from everybody that we will need a special quota allowance if many more of them come into the Chamber. This is an allocation of fishing opportunity. If people scale up, they leave the island. We are not interested in scaling up. We are interested in managing the fishery around the island so that the fish and spawning areas, all those things, will be there. We would work with anybody to make that happen. We are also considering something that came up about the 6-mile limit. We work within the 6-mile limit because that is a competency of Ireland under the current CFP, which we have to work with unless this new scheme about the baseline is investigated further.

However, that essentially has nothing to do with us. It has to do with where we are at the moment. We are within the six-mile limit, which is an Irish competence, which means that the Minister or this committee can decide. This piece of work has been approved. It has gone through all the relevant legal people and Departments. Everyone singed off on this before it came in. When we saw that, we teamed up with our neighbour islands in Donegal and Kerry. We felt that this was great and that we could now start promoting this for our islands, and we continued with that.

Somebody may remind me whether I have forgotten something.