Mr. Patrick Murphy:

I thank Deputy Collins for his questions. I have brought some visual aids. I have fact sheets from the Department on the amount of fish we catch and the fish in our waters. There is a big change to what we were told, so I will explain the 15% figure very simply. We do not catch 100% of the fish, with a value of €180 million, allowed to us, as mentioned by Mr. Lynch. However, as Mr. O'Donoghue and others have said, I guarantee that in the case of both the nephrops and mackerel, virtually 100% of the quota is caught. All the fish we lost, as Mr. Lynch said, were the money fish. When we break it down, it amounted to more than 25%.

What we also failed to take into account was the non-quota species, which was the Rockall squid. That is a very important fishery and we do not have access to it as a direct result of what happened with Brexit. This goes from €5 million to €10 million so members can see how fast this money ramps up with regard to the fish lost by the scallop men.

On bluefin tuna, we were told by previous Ministers that it would not be worth it, with the price we would have to pay to swap out. This is despite us producing facts and evidence of sales dockets. One of our members still has the original dockets from landing these fish. Derek Davis did a programme on bluefin tuna and the fishery we had, in which officials in the Department said it was great and fantastic. Yet, we have no tuna. We have seen how other countries have used the change in the migration patterns of these fish to sensibly ask for a quota, because these fish are feeding off our native stocks, as my chairman has pointed out. We would be entitled under that to get it. The problem is that ICCAT says that Europe has our fish and it is up to us to go to our colleagues in Europe and look for a quota. We pointed out in our talks at the ICCAT meeting that the movement of fish such as bigeye tuna is going to be a massive problem for our fisheries because we do not have a quota for them. We are not allowed to land them, yet we will catch them mixed in with the other fisheries. They are not targeted but mixed in, yet we will be deemed to be illegal, unreported and unregulated, IUU, fishing because we do not have a quota for them. We cannot swap it out because we do not have a Mediterranean licence to land such fish. This is what we are trying to regulate and fight for ourselves. This year for the first time, in fairness to the Minister, he has informed us that he is looking for a quota for tuna. As my colleagues have said, this is crazy. This could choke fisheries. If we catch this fish, we are not allowed to go fishing for the other stocks we have in case we will be deemed as IUU quota.

To return to the Deputy's remarks on MEPs, Mick Wallace is the only MEP who has made contact with me. I met Grace O'Sullivan in Ringaskiddy at a restoring our ocean and lighthouse building event. I was a speaker at it, as was she. I think I got give minutes with her. I was shocked to learn, after the meeting, that she stepped down from the European Parliament Committee on Fisheries, PECH. We have no representative on Europe's PECH committee. I find this absolutely incredible, given the size of the waters, the amount of fish that spawn and breed in our waters and, as we heard, the importance of custodians of the sea.

We are talking about blue whiting. There are millions of tonnes. The catch is 1.39 million but that is only a proportion of the biomass of the stock. Again, this is down. I brought the stock book with me today and we have real concerns about the way the advice is given. I attended a meeting the other day and was told that the advice for hake was 83,000 tonnes. I challenged that and said that it was not correct and they said that it was the maximum sustainable yield, that was the advice they were given. Yet last year we got 44,000 tonnes. This year we are getting an increase of 13% but a real increase of 3% because it is knocking off 10% of what we took last year. This does not even rebalance the fact that this stock has seen a benchmark and the biomass of the stock has been revised upwards by 71%. That is 71% of an increase in biomass and we get a 13% increase where we had a 25% cut last year and I think it was up to 20's from 2019 all the way through and we have been absolutely savaged.

The article Mr. O'Donoghue referred is Article 26.2 and it was put into legislation in the EU to allow us to get our fuel aid. All of us met the Commission officials several times and they told us this is what they want. They feel it is better to support boats to go fishing rather than getting nothing out of it seeing them tied to the pier wall, bringing in no fish and not creating employment ashore. They want boats to go fishing yet we cannot get a subsidy for fuel to allow boats to go to sea and to fish financially viably. It is absolutely crazy.

I hope the Vice Chair will take the time to look at our presentation. Like last year, we put in pictures of boats and of people that were spending hundreds of thousands of euro putting these boats out to sea safely. One of the boats in those pictures will be decommissioned or scrapped. It is going to be undervalued and is not going to get the money that I believe is due and what it cost to buy that boat and put that boat on the water. That is why, like Mr. Early said, his organisation did not support the decommissioning scheme. We acknowledged that because we could not get any fish the books would not match up and it was inevitable there would be a decommissioning scheme. We made sure as an organisation that it was put into the draft report that our organisation did not agree with the terms and conditions of the scheme and that it was flawed. That is why we did not support the scheme as it was written. We supported the principle of a decommissioning scheme because we were in desperation and as John said we had no choice and boats had to get out. There are just not enough fish there after losing 25% per quarter.