Dr. Ciaran Byrne:

The Chairman has raised a few points which I will try to tease out. Regarding straightforward capital investment, we received two tranches of funding from the NSAD, €500,000 in 2016 and €1.5 million in 2017. Both of these allocations were for capital. As the Chairman will appreciate, we can only spend them on capital works. We have tried to the best of our ability to incorporate as much operational money as we can under the heading of capital works. However, they are explicitly capital works. That is a source of frustration because there are certain things we can do with capital money that we cannot do under the rubric of operational maintenance.

There is no question that the situation has changed.

IFI was established in 2010, following the amalgamation of the Central and Regional Fisheries Boards. In one sense, the ownership model has changed, because people had a close linkage to the Western Regional Fisheries Board and were only a telephone call away from a board member, which kept that sense of people being accessible on the ground. On the governance side, the fisheries service went from 164 board members to ten and from regional boards to the unitary IFI.

There were also changes in staffing. Like every State agency, we experienced commensurate reductions in the difficult period of the recession. Our agency went from a head count of approximately 440 whole-time equivalents to 269 at the lowest point. We also supplemented the 440 staff with up to 60 temporary seasonal staff. In the peak of summer as many as 500 people were working on the ground. Resources were certainly cut back. As an agency, we are forced to look at how we deliver the service. The question for us is whether we can be the people on the ground all the time. We cannot do that with the resources we have.

One of the big developments was a lot of negativity towards the NSAD. I am aware of this. Obviously it became very political and public. We established the programme management office. Our programme manager comes from a western constituency and he is very much aware of the needs and the individual stakeholders. A chap called Mr. Liam Gavin, who is one of our assistant inspectors, manages that office. He is very much clued in on the situation on the ground in the west. I have tried to engage the programme manager's office with the project owners and the applicants on a regular basis.

There is another element, which does not just apply to IFI but is common to all State agencies. Governance requirements have increased significantly over the years. In our area we have financial governance requirements, as does every agency, concerning how we distribute taxpayers' money, grant money and whatnot. We also have a separate box, which is environmental governance requirements. There has been a much greater focus on them. I will be honest with the Deputy. The level of governance required is significant, and many clubs that might have been able to tip away and do a few bits and pieces find it is beyond their grasp. That is why we have invested so heavily in the programme management office to try to bring those clubs up to standard.