Urgent - Consultation on EU Maritime Policy

The EU is putting together a MAritime Policy Towards a future Maritime Policy for the Union: A European vision for the oceans and seas

The Dept of Comms Marine and Nat Resources is having a consultation process, which ends tomorrow 2nd March! Only got this myself, and have put in a submission.
If anyone wants to make a submission - marine protection zones, whatever, better do it now! Go to [url]http://www.maritimegreenpaper.ie[/url] for details
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Irish Bass Protection and Awareness Group (IBPAG) (http://www.irishbass.org) have also made a submission, which is now on the Green Paper website. I was in a similar position to Bradan, only found out about it late last week and had to pull something brief together.

I think it's worth getting as many recreational stakeholder submissions into this as possible. The recreational sea angling sector doesn't do nearly enough to make itself heard.

In the future, it would also be nice to see the recreational sea angling sector rally around a small number of representative bodies, to reduce fragmentation. Unfortunately there is no such organisation in Ireland at the moment. In fact, this forum is probably the closest we get to the sector communicating as a whole ...

In the future, it would also be nice to see the recreational sea angling sector rally around a small number of representative bodies, to reduce fragmentation. Unfortunately there is no such organisation in Ireland at the moment.

Reading this again, I probably need to clarify what I said.

I wasn't referring to one particular issue (like conservation, where we have a good representative organisation - SACN - which more people should join).

Instead, what I meant was having one or two organisations that lobby on behalf of all the RSA stakeholders, including match angling, sportfishing, angling guides, tackle dealers, angling tourism service providers, charter boat operators, conservation, etc., etc.