Ms Teresa Morrissey:

Licences are issued for a term of ten years. We have many licences, as Ms McManus and Mr. O’Sullivan noted, waiting 15 or 20 years to be renewed. They are covered under legislation, in that they can operate, which is fine, but there are concerns about things like the licence conditions being out of date, to a certain extent, as Ms McManus referred to, and in terms of the ability to produce at a level that is economic and using modern and innovative practices. Obviously, we have moved on in the last 30 years. That is one aspect. If someone is waiting 20 years for a ten-year licence to be renewed and the licence is out of date, that does not work. One of the things that can be acted on is to issue a 20-year licence term.

That is actually provided for in our current legislation. To do that, however, we also need legislative changes to facilitate the monitoring and compliance that would need to go with a 20-year licence term. Therefore, it is not a case of issuing a 20-year licence term and people come back in 19 years when they need their renewal. That is not what we are saying. We are saying we need a proper monitoring compliance system alongside that 20-year licence term, which is really tied up in the renewal of the licence as well because in order to renew the licence, in the case of shellfish, people need an appropriate assessment carried out on a bay basis. That is carried out by the State. It is carried out by the Marine Institute. There are huge delays there in carrying out that work. It is very important work that needs to be done. In the case of a finfish licence, people need an environmental impact assessment along with many other types of assessment, such as an appropriate assessment and Natura impact statement. All that work needs to be done, and it is incredibly important that it is done and that is time-bound as well in that those investments have to be updated and renewed. However, we can build a licensing system that incorporates that so that maybe those assessments are done at a particular point several times, obviously, throughout that 20-year period.

We also have lots of different monitoring and regulatory systems that are already in place around fish health, benthic ecology and food safety, which are already built into the system. However, maybe those pieces are not connected up as well as they could be in a system that would be robust in terms of monitoring and compliance that would satisfy, as the Deputy rightly pointed out, people who have concerns, which are valid, and address those concerns. We have a system that is probably a bit piecemeal at the moment. There are some parts of it working very well and that function very well, but a lot of it does not speak to other parts of the system, if that makes sense. A 20-year licence term is possible, therefore, but there is a bit of work that has to go in underneath to be able to sustain that.