Seanad debates

Thursday, 26 January 2012

Agriculture and Fisheries: Statements, Questions and Answers

 

To respond to the question on aquaculture, we are doing a great deal to develop this area. Licensing has led to a great deal of frustration, but I have granted a series of aquaculture licences in the past few weeks. We must be consistent with EU law in habitats directives, including the Natura 2000 directive. Unfortunately, practically every bay around the coastline of Ireland is a Natura area. There are a few exceptions in west Cork, one or two in other parts, and Bantry Bay for example, is an exception. Generally in order to put a fish farm or any development that potentially changes the eco system in those harbours, one has to go through a process, which is laborious, difficult, expensive and time consuming. We are trying to do that as quickly as we possibly can. Unfortunately we are at the mercy of the European Commission because the way in which we provided aquaculture licences in the past was not up to scratch. The Commission took a case against Ireland and won it. We are now being forced to put in place a gold plated licensing system. This is time consuming but we are staring to get through the applications for bays and will continue to work as fast as we can. In the meantime we are trying to shift the whole dynamic in fish farming. We are supportive of exploring the potential of bays for fish farms, having considered the friction with anglers and their concerns around issues such as disease, lice or whatever caused by fish farms only and will grant permission only when it is appropriate to put salmon farms there. I believe there is capacity for much more fish farming in bays, but outside of that we are moving to a new horizon. Next week I will have a licence application on my desk for a 15,000 tonnes salmon farm off the west coast, but which one cannot see from the mainland. It is nearly 2 km east of the southern most Aran island. One can barely see it from the southern most island on a clear day. We have put the buoys out on the sea to see it visually. I have seen the photographs from that planning. We are trying to take advantage of the extraordinary demand for organic Atlantic Irish salmon. There is extraordinary demand for that product worldwide. We currently have an output of some 12,000 tonnes of farmed salmon each year. If permission for this farm is granted, having gone through a rigorous licensing process - I cannot show any favouritism here - this farm will more than double our national output of salmon. We will have three of these applications in place by the end of the year. We may have six such applications done and granted within two or three years. Scotland produces 150,000 tonnes of farmed salmon. Norway produces more than 1 million tonnes of farmed salmon and wants to increase it to 2 million tonnes. This is the market in which we are playing but the difference is that the world prices for salmon from Norway fell by nearly 40%. The price for organic, Irish farmed salmon remained steady and strong because people associate Irish product with very high quality, high end premium salmon for which they are willing to pay a premium. The challenge for us, and this applies to the food industry generally, is where there is a clear opportunity in terms of markets, we need to keep the standards we have managed to develop in what is currently a relatively small industry intact but work on increasing the volumes and outputs, thus growing the number of jobs.

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