Mr. Enda Conneely:

There are a few issues that keep cropping up, the first of which is the idea of a private quota. That is not in the frame at all and I do not know from where it came. Perhaps it arose as a result of the name of the Bill or the licence. The quota is allocated by the Minister to the fishing fleet. The quota that would be allocated to us would be to the polyvalent fleet on the islands that already exists. We have co-operative structures in place at the moment through which we would be able to manage that but we hope to have a producer organisation set up fairly soon to deal with that as well as with issues like markets and so forth.

The second issue is scale. Deputy Eamon Ryan mentioned the route to market. The business model that bigger operators like Killybegs Fishermen's Organisation, KFO, would be using would be a scale model. We are looking at a smaller scale scenario involving short routes to market. We are aware of people in Galicia, for instance, who have worked with fishers to put together marketing systems at a local level. We are also familiar with people in Cornwall who are doing the same. There are applications available now which enable fishers to sell the fish they catch. They stop fishing when they cannot sell their catch. They leave fish in the sea and only take what they need. These things are possible with technology. That is what we are working towards. If Inis Oírr pulls ahead with this and puts a good system in place, that can be replicated in Doolin and elsewhere. An island is a very contained unit and so provides an ideal environment for testing this model. We are looking at a scale that is small and manageable. If we make any mistakes or errors or if we figure out a better way of doing things, we will do so at a manageable scale.

It has taken us 30 years to get here, in the sense of going down. We are not going to get back up by magically being given access to fish. That said, we need access to start building up gradually. We need to build a marketing system. Everything that Deputy Ó Cuív said about how island, coastal and rural communities work is true in that everything is interlinked. Tourism needs fishing to happen, otherwise we will be importing Pangasius from somewhere else and serving it on Inishbofin or the Aran islands. That is not what we want to do. Everything is interlinked, including the small bits of farming, fishing and tourism. Scale is an issue. There seems to be a mad rush within the system to scale up everything. On the world stage, Ireland is not a scale economy as such. As a country we should be looking at where we get value as opposed to rushing to the simple marketing notion of scaling everything up, making products in China and selling them to somebody else.

We are dealing with a resource here that is diminishing. It is a finite resource. Technology is such now, especially at the industrial level, that we can actually kill every fish in the sea. In that context, we must scale back. All of the inshore area is mainly spawning ground. I am aware of one fishery in the late 1980s and early 1990s that got a market for herring roe. It targeted the spawning herring to such an extent that the species has still not recovered. We cannot do that kind of thing anymore. The scale at which we are working is not market led. If one gets into big boats, one gets into all sorts of problems. One has to kill more fish but there are no more fish so one has to manage it. That is where we have gone but we want to crawl our way slowly back. We can do that with this Bill. There will be amendments, I assume, in terms of legalities and things that can be done. The witnesses that were here today were all in favour, in principle, of doing something for the islands. However, their interpretation seemed to be that this would involve privatising quota but that is impossible. The Minister allocates quota to certain groups, as he or she does with everything else. We on the islands recognise paragraph 20 and Article 17.

I am conscious that we have been here all day and that the committee has given us an awful lot of time. I thank members for that. If we missed any questions, members know where we are - we are stuck on islands.