Dr. Ciaran Kelly:

Addressing pollock first, the assessment for pollock, which I think it came as a surprise to people, was on the basis of a change of the assessment ICES had given. There was some information in the public domain which people did not understand clearly. There was a confusion about the kind of surveys used on the basis of the advice. To clarify, some people had thought that beam trawl surveys were used but one does not catch pollock in beam trawls. That would be true. The surveys used were not beam trawl surveys but bottom trawl surveys. Even though those bottom trawl surveys would not be a primary fishing method for pollock, pollock was caught in those surveys. The information over ten years was looked at by ICES. It is statistically robust in indicating a decline but it is not that information alone. It is the surveys but it is also the catch data. Subsequent to that, we have looked at gill net surveys which one has to modify in a different way. Gill nets do catch pollock quite successfully. We have seen the same decline in the gill net catches of pollock. The signal we have is not just in the surveys. It is in the surveys, in the catches, and as the Minister said, it is over a very wide area. The pollock, which is fished off the north-west of Ireland, is a stock which exists from the west of Scotland right the way down into the Celtic Sea. France and the UK fish that stock as well as Ireland. It is the combination of those data which are put together.

To add to that, the Marine Institute and the Department are working very hard to upgrade the assessment on that. Much work has been done in the current year to move that assessment forward next year and to get a better outcome but that outcome will take several years to do. The assessment, as we would have it from the Marine Institute perspective, is robust at the moment.