Mr. John Lynch:

I thank Deputy Browne for his questions and comments. I will begin with burden sharing, which was covered very well by Mr. O'Donoghue. We absolutely need the Taoiseach, the Minister and the Government as a whole to push to have this burden sharing in Europe. There is a 40% loss to Ireland in the trade and co-operation agreement. This needs to be readjusted to a proper share. We respect that every processor state would lose something but out of eight states Ireland should not have taken 40% of the burden.

Another way we are disadvantaged because of Brexit is the Hague preferences. This is complicated. We have to apply for Hague preferences every year. When some of the quotas are reduced Ireland gets a small percentage of an increase from other states because the fishing territory lies around the coast of Ireland. Unfortunately, most of the Hague preferences we received came from the UK. With the UK no longer a member of the European Union the Hague preferences are not as advantageous to Ireland as they were in the past. Some compensation for our small share was achieved through the Hague preferences but since the UK left this is no longer the case as we used to get most of the preference from it.

With regard to decommissioning, as I said earlier to Deputy Mac Lochlainn, the decommissioning scheme being brought in is voluntary. We believe the premium being paid per tonne should be the full €12,000.

We do not agree with the discounts, particularly the discount on the age at investment. We do not and cannot agree with that.

The off-register tonnage is an absolute requirement and the fleet must have off-register tonnage to survive. Some of the other POs at the task force, which we supported, looked for a tonnage bank paid for by the State. John Ward has already noted that European funds cannot be used to store tonnage, so if we were to have a national tonnage bank, it would have to be from the national Exchequer. We believe this would be worthwhile and that we could use it again in the future, when we get burden sharing and get a fairer share of quotas.

Off-register tonnage is needed for the future development of the fleet. Any time a vessel is changed or even if an engine is changed inside a vessel, kilowatts and tonnage are altered so, up and down, we need tonnage and we need off-register capacity to allow for this. We also need it for the building of new vessels. When new vessels are being built at the moment, for a similar type of vessel the tonnage is way higher because of the new regulations in shipbuilding. Given the rules being applied for safety reasons by the Marine Survey Office in the Department of Transport as regards the building of fishing vessels, the vessel requires a lot more tonnage for the same lame length of vessel when compared to the previous position. For that reason, we need off-register tonnage.

I will leave it at that because all of the items have been well covered by the other speakers.