The socioeconomic impact of the seafood sector at Ireland’s main ports

Abstract

The seafood sector in Ireland is an important economic and social driver for communities around the coastline of the island. Many coastal communities in Ireland are situated far from regional urban centres with lower levels of infrastructure making these locations less attractive to industry. In order to capture detailed information on seafood supply chains in Ireland and how these evolve over time, a programme of periodical assessments of the top ten fishing ports was developed. While many studies have assessed the links of seafood sectors with the wider economy at the national level or for a specific port, no studies have been found that assess the sector at numerous ports across multiple regions of a country. The assessment detailed here will be carried out every five years utilizing the same methodology where linkages of the seafood sector with other parts of the local, regional and national economies will be assessed by surveying producers and adapting national input-output tables with the survey results. The survey was carried out in 2019 and the data collected referred to production in 2018. The main findings were that for every four direct employees in the seafood sector, three were employed in the wider economy. Significant variance in multipliers was found across ports and subsectors highlighting the importance of assessing multiple ports and regions when assessing the national seafood sector. In this paper the methodology used to carry out this assessment will be detailed with an overview of the results across the main ports.