Mr. Dominic Rihan:

It is a very salient point. The Deputy is absolutely right that fishermen want to fish. This is absolutely clear and there is no fisherman who wants to tie his boat to the wall but we are where we are. If we look at the pelagic side, under the Brexit scheme there was a liquidity fund provided for RSW boats, which reflected some of their losses. We need something similar to that for the pelagic fleet to get over this hump in the short term - to keep the crew and the businesses afloat and to keep loans being paid, and whatever else. From the whitefish side, again we are going to face a shortage of quota. We have been trying to manage the quota for 12 months. We need to look at some sort of a tie-up scheme, like we had before under Brexit, so we can spread the quota over the year and maintain supply of fish to the factories. In those terms, that is for the catching sector. We need those kinds of financial support in the short term. The short term is not necessarily a year, because mackerel will not recover in a year, and for some of the other white fish stocks we are looking at a few years of this to get them over that hump, on the basis of resilience.

It is not just about financial support. We need to look at what we can control in the short term. We have a very rigid quota management policy in this country. It has served us quite well but we need as much flexibility as possible in that so that the vessels can operate to maximise what they can catch and make sure we do not leave a fish that we could catch in the sea.

Every fish is important. We need to really look at our own national policies to see what we can do with them and how we can introduce some flexibilities that, again, will help operators in the short term to get over this hump. I will let Mr. Byrne talk a little on the processing side because, as I said, it is his side of the fence.