Ms Sinéad McSherry:

I think the Deputy answered the first part of the question when he said that I cannot speak to the political process or view. In terms of what the Department can put in place to support fishers and try to move them through this, there is the work of the Department, the services they receive from us and the work of our agencies such as the Marine Institute. The Department invests a huge amount in support of Marine Institute research, which looks at stock assessments and feeds into the ICES advice to ensure we have confidence in the advice we follow in relation to the TAC and the quotas. Equally, the Department makes a significant investment in BIM annually. A lot of its work follows through on Government policy in relation to supporting the fishing industry, promoting technological developments like gear changes, making better use of fuel and supporting diversification in the sector, not out of it, with multifaceted businesses.

On how the fishing industry feels about itself, I can only speak to what we see and what we are trying to do. Nobody can dispute the fact of the impact of Brexit and what we have been trying to do with the schemes we put in place to build on the capacity that is there. Equally, there is work to be done to attract landings to support the processing sector in having the raw material to process. The issue I mentioned earlier is the Minister's call in the CFP evaluation to look at the economic link obligation. That could be key. We also need to look within ourselves and within the sector at what we are doing to attract vessels to land. The Department has put superb infrastructure in place across the six fishery harbour centres. There is huge capacity and investment in that. It is about enticing vessels to land and discharge their fish in order to process.