Shane Ross (Dublin South, Independent)

That is important. I am delighted the Minister has replied to the question.

The Minister may have addressed the second point in his opening speech but I did not hear him; it relates to the licensing of bays and whether it is still producing a formidable delay to the development of the fishing industry, in particular shellfish.

The big question is one which I cannot resolve but which the Minister is probably at pains to resolve, namely, the problem of over-fishing. I was impressed by what Deputy Pringle said about that. In an amateur way I was also impressed by a briefing I received from the Pew Environment Group. The argument is that scientific limits, which appear to be totally arbitrary, are pretty well ignored. It seems that the figures for the EU limits, with which I presume the Minister is familiar, are breached by approximately 48%. They go above the scientific limit. The scientific limits do not seem to matter at all. Approximately 70% of the assessed stock is over-fished by the industry.

The other matter on which I would like the Minister to respond is the World Bank report. It was called something quite obscure such as, The Sunken Billions. It is a dramatic report which indicates that over-fishing globally costs approximately $50 billion per annum.

Subsidies appear to be a thorny subject, particularly from the European Union. Figures kindly provided to me by Deputy Pringle indicate that the European Union is paying tens of millions of euro in fishing subsidies to countries that have neither fishing fleets nor even a coastline, and that landlocked countries such as Austria, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic shared a sum of more than €20 million in a single year despite none of them landing any fish according to a report from the environmental group, Oceana, into the scandal of EU fisheries.

There are other instances of subsidies being almost inexplicable. A total of approximately €13 million was distributed by the European Union to modernise fishing fleets between 1994 and 2006 with a further €130 million paid out to owners to scrap the same vessels. In one case a Spanish owner was given a €1,000 subsidy for improvements to his trawler and then just 17 days later he was handed €26,000 to dispose of the same boat.

Spain is the biggest beneficiary of EU fishing subsidies, pocketing more than €5 billion in grants since 2000. This sum is about a third of the fishing aid spent across the EU and accounts for almost a third of the value of the fishing industry.

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