Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to begin by congratulating our rapporteurs, Mr Ojeda and Mrs Miguélez, because they are both presenting us with fisheries agreements and our Committee on Fisheries has done its duties perfectly in these reports. I am going to refer essentially to the issue of Greenland, because I believe it to be important. We are seeing great unanimity here on the part of all Members and this seems to me to be very positive and very important. We are in a good frame of mind! Commissioner, I would like to congratulate you on your speech and the communication that has been made. Parliament and the Commission are in agreement, which is very important and, with a view to the new Protocol which is going to be signed from 1 January of next year, I believe there is agreement already between the Member States themselves. If you will allow me to say this, I believe the Commission has backed down, or if I may put it another way, the wise are ready to rectify. As far as I remember, we in this Parliament have been calling for greater equity, greater transparency and greater justice in this agreement compared to the agreements in the south since 1994 and now this is beginning to be acknowledged. I would also like to congratulate the new Director-General for Fisheries, Mr Holmquist, and the Director for Foreign Policy, because I know that they have made extraordinary efforts to make progress on the new line which Parliament is presenting at the moment and which – we all agree – is the line we must use for the agreement with Greenland. The previous one, as has been said several times, was a scandal, and this is how the Court of Auditors saw it, as did this Parliament, because there were paper fish, there was wastage of quotas, which were not used by the States who could do so, as happens with the agreements in the south, and also there was non-payment of licences by ship owners. Now this is being unified with the criteria of the agreements in the south and I believe that this is a truly positive step. There is agreement in the Commission, there is agreement in the Council, as I understand it, and there will also be agreement in this Parliament. Moreover, this is something we should all be pleased about for the sake of the interests of the European Union and all its Member States, naturally, and also in the interests of Greenland. We are moving in the direction of mutual interest, and that is what is needed. Experimental campaigns have been authorised since July, for new species, and there are possibilities for diversifying fisheries in Greenland, which is positive – I was in Greenland when I was chairman of the committee – and I know that there are other scientific possibilities and they must therefore be exploited. I would draw your attention to mixed undertakings – I believe this is very important – and to temporary associations of undertakings. The fishermen of Greenland themselves had asked me personally to help them achieve mixed undertakings, and therefore the issue is of interest to them, and I believe that by diversifying fishing opportunities in Greenland and by making it possible to use all the fisheries quotas, we will have done something very positive, as I have said, so that we can all be happy with the new Protocol which is going to be signed now from January and also in 2006.

Political group: PPE-DE