Mr. John O'Sullivan:

On bluefin tuna, we do not even have a quota. We have only a 1% by-catch. The Koreans and the Japanese have a big fleet outside our 200-mile zone. We do not know how much they are catching. There is no one controlling them. Our waters are full of bluefin tuna feeding on our stock. We are fattening them up for others. Ireland has no quota. We should have asked for a quota in 1997 or 1998 but we did not. We had a boat long-line fishing out of Castletownbere for bluefin tuna and sending the fish out to Japan. We had drift net fishermen catching albacore tuna at the time and we caught bluefin tuna as well. However, Ireland did not ask for a quota and it is time we asked for one. Our waters are teeming with bluefin tuna.

Blue whiting is another fiasco. We have just over 3% out of 1 million tonnes of blue whiting. Norway catches over 200,000 tonnes in our waters. It has been allowed to do that since 2011 or 2014 and now wants to access double that figure. We need to get at least 80,000 tonnes, and possibly 100,000 tonnes, in return for this quota to keep our fleet alive.

I am the Chair of the Irish South and West Fish Producers Organisation, which represents pelagic boats in the polyvalent sector as well. A new boat arrived last week and I think there are three more coming to our fleet. There are boats that were modified over the years. We really need quota. We lost so much in Brexit. It has a massive effect on us because we have only 13% of the mackerel quota between 27 boats. Of the 50 boats allocated mackerel quota every year, 27 have access to only 13% of the mackerel fishery. We have access to only 9% of the blue whiting fishery. Boats that have fished in that fishery since 2004 now have to go into a lottery to get a quota every year. Boats in the other pelagic segment do not have to do so because each of them gets a quota every year. It is crazy. How are we going to survive? How are the new boats coming in going to survive? Will we have another decommissioning scheme in our fleet? How are the new boats going to be paid for? Boats were ordered before Brexit happened. It is just crazy. We were very worried about our future. I ask the Government to look into the redistribution of pelagic quotas between the polyvalent sector and the refrigerated seawater systems, RSW, sector. We need that extra bit to survive. What we do not need is to get in more boats that need to be decommissioned.