Mr. Enda Conneely:

I will hand the issue of the social welfare changes to Mr. Bonner. The MPA legislation depends on what is in the legislation. We have been looking at co-management models. The people who know most about the environment are those of us who are in it all the time. We had systems in place before the CFP. We fished seasonally in certain areas at certain times. Some people could move into one area and move out of it again. There was a kind of local issue like that. We have centralised everything and we now have to try to go back. Ireland's west coast is very diverse. You would nearly want to examine it bay by bay because things are so different there.

It depends on how the MPA legislation comes out. One of the biggest issues we have with it is the notion that there would be no-take zones within the MPA. The jury is out on that. In some areas, it kind of works as it tends to displace people. However, over time, in some of the areas we have looked at, it tends not to really deliver. There are possibilities for certain small sections, but it would need a lot of local involvement. In the main, we would be keen to work with that. We are already doing a lot of work on data gathering and all of the stuff that we can do ourselves. That is where we are coming from. We will have to see what the legislation is like when it comes out. We will deal with it then. The main thing is that we do not like the idea of no-take zones because that will not work.