Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

Those vessels are very welcome, and the investment programme in 2012 was not a small investment given the economic situation at the time. However, I am looking for the Minister of State to join with his ministerial colleagues in setting a big ambition of very large-scale marine conservation. My understanding from talking to naval officers and others is that the current system is very hard to police. It is very hard to police certain fleets of other nations. The best case example might be New Zealand or other countries where they shut down large areas. The benefit of that is to fisheries. Another benefit is that the small inshore fleet might begin to have a viable future. Also, we could take some of the analysis that was done in Galway Bay, SmartBay, and do it as a major research project out in the Atlantic. The scale of ambition I am talking about is in terms of very big marine conservation areas that are rigorously policed and scientifically analysed. That is where the opportunity lies. I am not too sure if the four vessels we have procured, among them the LE William Butler Yeats, the LE Samuel Beckett, the LE James Joyce, are necessarily well commissioned for that sort of scientific work. It is a slightly different approach to boarding a Spanish trawler or whatever. We want to keep everything out in certain areas, make it a no-catch zone and have a Navy to serve that mission and to do the scientific research to back it up, which is the Navy we should be moving towards.

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