Ms Caroline Bocquel:

I thank the Deputy. All the companies he has namechecked are clients of ours and we provide a lot of support to them. It is not just in grant aid, which is obviously of huge importance, but in helping them develop their business and develop their succession planning. We held a conference on that in the first quarter of this year and it was very well attended. The vast majority of our seafood companies are owned by families. Many are moving into the second or even third generation and we are working with them to ensure they stay locally held within families, ideally within their local communities, and that we help them grow those businesses. That is an area where we provide a huge amount of support to those companies, because they are also navigating a global market and competing with imports. They are dealing with their local restaurants that have lots of other avenues to source fish and oysters from.

That is a huge focus of what we are doing.

As regards the licensing, we provide a lot of support to clients on the ground. We have a whole team of aquaculture officers who help clients to prepare their licences, mark their sites and help prepare them for that process. Obviously, we are not granting those licences, but we are certainly doing everything we can to ensure the process is as timely as possible.

As regards pair trawling, which has become quite topical recently, all our fishing practices in Ireland are regulated by the European Commission and bounded on sustainability, so many of the practices that may be seen in other jurisdictions outside of Europe are not the same practices we have here. They are very sustainable. We have a whole team that works on fisheries conservation and it is constantly looking at not only how to reduce the energy costs of fishing but also how to ensure we are causing as little damage as possible to the seabed and not catching species that are not targeted to be caught, whether it is bycatch or species we do not have a quota for. We are very cognisant that the sustainability of everything to do with the sector is really at the cornerstone of what we do in BIM. We operate sustainable practices throughout our whole fishing sector and it is an area on which we are very focused.