Noel Dempsey (Meath, Fianna Fail)

——on weighing fish on the basis that we would be putting pelagic fish controllers into various processors at Killybegs to monitor the arrival of fish at those processors. That was to ensure that all the trucks would carry the appropriate documentation identifying the source of fish being transported. They have a duty to confirm and monitor the identity and species of fish being processed to counteract any possible misdeclaration of horse mackerel or blue whiting. They also have a duty to monitor and record the departure of frozen fish consignments from these processors. That is part of the chain I talked about to assist traceability under the required food regulations and to provide base data for investigations and audits to be carried out in future.

I regret to inform the House that, in anticipation of deploying controllers at various processing plants, when the Department rang each of the pelagic fish processors in the Killybegs area informing them that PFCs would be deployed, the response from all the processors, apart from two who are not in active production at the moment, was negative. The general message was that the processors would not receive the controllers into their factories. This occurred in the middle of the debate when people are trying to convince everybody that everything is all right in the fishing industry and that we should have some controls, traceability and monitoring in the industry.

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