asked the Minister for the Marine the number of rod licences purchased for brown trout fishing in 1988, as requested in Parliamentary Questions Nos. 14, 21 and 22 of 25 October 1988.
54.
Ceisteanna—Questions Oral Answers - Rod Licences.
14.
asked the Minister for the Marine the numbers of trout and coarse angling licences purchased in 1988.
I propose to answer Questions Nos. 14 and 54 together.
The figures requested have not yet been finalised. They will be supplied to the Deputies as soon as they are available.
In this House on 25 October the Minister promised, as reported at column 553 of the Official Report, that the licences would be available at the end of October. I put it to the Minister of State that now, one month later, the figures should be available to the House. I suggest that it would be easy enough to count them.
The Chair takes the view that the Deputy is not quoting from the document.
The figures are not available to me and the Deputy must accept that what I am telling him is the position. They are not available to me and I have not suggested that the Deputy should wait for a further four months before tabling a further parlimentary question, rather I have said that as soon as the figures are available to me they will be made available to the Deputies in question.
I tabled a question to the Minister on 25 October asking for similar information and I was assured by him that the information would be made available in early November but to date we have not received it. Is the Minister of State in a position to at least give us the figures for the number of licences purchased in some of the fishery board areas? Perhaps he is not in a position to give the figures for all areas but he may be in the position to give the figures for some of them. Would it be true to say at this stage that this information is being withheld because the figure for the number of licences purchased is not the number which the Minister expected when he introduced the legislation? Is that not a more true reflection of the position rather than it being a case of the figures not being available?
I detect that there is harmony in the House today but I feel that the Opposition spokesperson is being mischievous when she suggests that the figures are being withheld deliberately. We are here to make the facts available and if the figures had been made available to me the Deputy would have received them. There is nothing mischievous about it but it is being mischievous, instead of falling in behind us and supporting legislation which was passed almost unanimously by this House, to advise people that they should continue with their campaigns. Indeed when the bells rang in this House everyone responded at that time and no vote was taken.
Would the Minister of State not agree that both he and the Minister for the Marine are very sensitive about this topic, are failing to do anything constructive to solve the problem and are sticking their heads in the sand?
The time has come to deal with other questions.
We are not a bit sensitive; we are realistic. We have never given the impression, not even in Opposition, that amendments could go through this House overnight. Even when Deputy McCoy introduced his Bill the impression given to the public at large was that if the Bill was accepted in the House it would take some months before this could be introduced. We were being realistic.
That was six months ago.
The time has come to deal with questions nominated for priority. I am asking for the co-operation of Deputies to assist me to dispose of the five questions within the prescribed time, that is a quarter of an hour. I propose to deal with other questions at 3.45 p.m.