Dr. Ciaran Kelly:

On the resource assessments that feed into the figures in the sustainability assessment, the fish stocks, as the Minister said, are fished by multiple different countries and they are also assessed by multiple different countries. The information that leads into the assessment of a stock contains not only the Irish data from the Irish catches but also that from the French and Spanish and the UK, for that matter. In the case of the international stocks, it also contains the catch and survey data from other international parties such as Russia, Norway and Iceland. It is a large international collaborative effort that is used to do that assessment. One of the things that has impacted some, although not all, of the assessments in the past two years is Covid and the ability to be able to get sampling data from vessels. One of the factors was that we put in a mechanism to get the fishing industry to collaborate with us to do self sampling, and Ireland coped very well in this regard. They were bringing samples of the catches ashore so that we could biologically assess them but some other countries did not have that scheme in place and, therefore, the data became poorer during Covid. It was during the Covid period, when the data got poorer, that impacted the assessments that are now coming through. That is one reason some of the assessments have got poorer recently. That should be rectified in time. An international sampling agreement is in place in the EU called the data collection framework. All European countries participate in that. Everyone puts their shoulder to the wheel to collect the data and put it through into the assessment. That short-term situation around Covid should be ameliorated. In the longer term, there are always stocks for which there is simply insufficient information. These are stocks that are caught as a by-catch. The information on those is not good enough to do the assessments from which we give figures for maximum sustainable yield, MSY, for example. Those stocks are assessed and advice is given on the precautionary approach. Sometimes the MSY stocks status would be unknown but in relation to the precautionary approach, a precautionary advice would be given to manage those stocks.