Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I am very interested in fish farming but I am also absolutely committed to the broader fishing industry. I am upbeat about the industry because it has a bright future. However, we need to manage both it and our fish stocks in a sustainable way. Some of the stocks are currently in the process of recovery. For example, many of the fishermen whom Deputy Daly knows are fishing in the Irish Sea and they will know that a cod recovery plan is in place there.

With regard to the Deputy's point about the collection of data, in many ways the European Commission uses Ireland and the Marine Institute as the example of how data should be collected. The Marine Institute is independent of the fishing industry and it has credibility within the industry. One of the reasons for Ireland's significant quota increases in a series of species last year was that the Marine Institute played a central role in last December's negotiations on the annual quota allocations or TACs, total allowable catches, for the Irish fishing fleet. We will continue to take a scientific approach to the management of fish stocks. We will not be catching fish that are not there.

We will, where possible, put measures in place to ensure stocks can recover and the fishing industry can grow. We are unusual in Europe in that only some 20% of the fish caught in the waters we control are caught by Irish boats, with the remaining 80% being caught by foreign fleets. We are obliged to collect the data from all of these boats. As such, we have strongly supported the Commission's proposal for electronic logbooks, for example, which would allow us to gather the data as quickly as possible from the many fleets that come in and out of Irish waters at different times. It is a complex job. Only this morning we made the case to the Commission that the European Fisheries Fund should support countries such as Ireland to put improved data collection systems in place to manage our fish stocks.

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