Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 9 October 2024
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine
Issues Impacting the Fisheries Sector and Aquaculture: Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine
5:30 pm
Michael Ring (Mayo, Fine Gael)
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That is fair enough. Ms McSherry is not the Minister, to be fair, and I cannot say any more about that. Nevertheless, she might get the Department to consider other species that fishers could fish but are not allowed to. These people have gone through a very difficult time over recent years. This keeps a lot of jobs and people working and a lot of money in the economy, especially in rural Ireland. In many of these areas, there is just no other employment. What are we doing to try to keep young people in that industry? As is the case in agriculture, we sometimes forget that if we do not produce good-quality food that people want, it will be only when it has gone and something happens in the country from which we are importing it that we wonder why we ever let it go. It is like the sugar factories. We had our own independent factories but we let them go and started bringing in the product from Brazil and elsewhere. Is anything being done to try to keep young people in that industry and support them?