Mr. Patrick Murphy:

I apologise to Deputy Ward, as I did not get that question. I refer back to the question Deputy Ward asked, and fair play to him, a man from Killybegs. He mentioned Castletownbere and the impacts of quotas. I will mention a couple of simple facts. I have a vessel owner who had 700 tonnes of mackerel to catch. This year, he will be lucky if he has 70 tonnes. We have one factory left in the whole country outside of Killybegs. Speaking to that factory owner, he cannot see how he can financially keep the doors open with what is coming. This means that everything - what little we have of it - will have to be trucked up to Killybegs. I find this incredible in this day and age when we are talking about carbon footprints. When I started in fisheries in my youth, we had predominantly timber boats that could not compete with the foreign fleets. It took two generations to acquire the vessels we have now and they could be wiped out at the stroke of a pen because the opportunities are not there.

Referring to Deputy Whitmore's question, we put forward management plans of our interactions, looking after stocks, and the size of fish. We do not have the resources within the Department to implement them. We were told this at the last meeting with our Minister. That may be something the committee can raise. This is on BSA crab where the industry, with the active participants, brought up a management plan and were told the resources were not there within the Department to bring it in. A person might be told that it is late in the year but we raised this in August. This may be something the committee could raise with the Minister of State and his Department when they come in. As Mr. Lynch said, we have a minium size for species and we are looking towards an increase. We increased the mesh sizes and we use technical measures. We are constantly working on them in the industry. However, we were told in my industry that if we left the juveniles behind us, protected them and increased the mesh sizes, we would have larger fish to catch. Since we advocate for quotas as an actual quantity, not in weight or the amount in numbers, then big fish is what we will catch. We face a dilemma. We are leaving the juveniles behind us and targeting the larger fish but if we are not allowed to target the larger fish or the juveniles, then we will need help to cross the divide of what needs to be done to rebuild the stocks.