Mr. Michael Desmond:

I can take the money side of it if Mr. Dixon wants to do the quota question afterwards. The funding was from the Brexit adjustment reserve fund, BAR . Everyone knows the effect Brexit had on the fishing industry in Ireland. We were not allowed on the task force because we were not a producer organisation at the time, so we had to feed into it and give our opinion. Of the fleet, 95% got no financial aid whatsoever from however many hundreds of millions of euro it was. They said it was because we could not prove that we were negatively affected by the quota being decreased. The biggest decrease in quota was in mackerel, which was 25%, but we were denied access to the mackerel quota by our own Government. The reason we lost 25% of the mackerel quota was because Michel Barnier's negotiators saw which quota was affecting the smallest number of people. When they saw that the mackerel quota was only affecting 40-something boats, they gave away 25% of it. It was ironic, but we lost out both ways. We gave many reasons we were affected by Brexit but we could not use them because they were not specific to the fishing industry. We were told by both the Department and BIM officials at the time that we could not say that, because sheep or chicken farmers might say the same thing. Because we might have opened the door to somebody else from outside the fishing industry being able to claim the money, we were not allowed to use those reasons. Therefore, 95% of the Irish fishing fleet got no direct financial aid from a BAR scheme that was supposed to be for the Irish fishing industry. There was €48 million in a tie-up scheme for the larger white fish trawlers - which they deserved - no one is saying they did not. I do not know how much the decommissioning scheme came to, but it was probably something similar. There was €26 million for the pelagic fishing boats but for 95% of the fleet it was just, "sorry lads".