Mr. Patrick Murphy:

I thank the Chairman. I would classify myself as an islander. We come from Heir island and our family home is still there. I started fishing out of Baltimore around the islands. Like my colleague, I have a great interest in the island communities. I was one of the pioneers of setting up a V-notching programme around the south-west coast. The problem, as my colleagues have articulated, is that at present the law will not allow us to give an individual quota to anyone. I learned this the hard way. When we established the lobster V-notching programme and looked for protection for people who had put a lot of time, money and effort into protecting their own fishery, even though many of them were not participating in it, when we looked for a licence for those individuals we were told that unless they had a fishing boat licence, they would not give a second licence, which was the case with salmon licensing. This is the crux of the problem.

As my colleague, Mr. Casey, has explained, there is a solution to this. We, as a country, did not protect our inland waters inside the baseline. We did not give away the fish that swim inside in that baseline to Europe, it is our fish. However, Ireland counts it against Ireland's quota which we get from Europe, which is about 10% of the quota. I see this as a solution. As an island person I see it as a fantastic way of looking at this. We can calculate the amount of fish that has been caught inside the baseline in previous years, then tell Europe that this is fish that was logged and caught inside the baseline but should not have come off Ireland's quota because it was Ireland's fish. We want to do something with that fish now. The principle of this is to allow the people of the islands to remain on their island homes and access the resource that is around them. As Mr. Boyle pointed out, there is very now very little of that resource inside the area with different types of fish, so one has to look at the economic sense of what the fishermen in an island community can and will use. I am confused by the term of giving them 1% off the top. If they cannot access that 1%, is it theirs to trade or use as a commodity elsewhere? If, as Ms Parke said, they do not catch it, will they lose the right to that fish because of the fish that swim in the inshore waters around these islands? That is why I have let this educated man make the proposal to this committee. Legislators have a very important job of looking after all the communities of this country, including the coastal communities. I stress that there is an opportunity to examine the legalities of whether we can get back the fish within our baseline for Ireland and change the laws to accommodate the purpose of this Bill.