The scary truth behind ghost fishing

Another Life: Among the torn furls of fishing net that arrive on our tideline some fragments are quite big - many metres across - and of toughly-woven mesh.

In what are fast becoming "olden days", these were salvaged to cover turf stacks or harness ricks of hay. I have trudged back with a few bundles myself, having my father's eye for things that might come in handy.

Wodges of net in different colours hang around in corners of the woodshed, taunting me with their indestructibility.

From time to time, the jetsam at the breakers' edge has also included a great mound of monofilament gill-net, its glassy meshes already working their way into the sand (there to join, I imagine, the great stratum of buried plastic trapped above the bedrock). Without waves to bury it, however - as in the still, dark water of the deep Atlantic seabed - such a gill net, unretrieved, can go on "fishing" whatever comes its way, perhaps for two or three years or even more.

In last week's column, the new EU fishing quotas prompted a discourse on Nephrops norvegicus, the big "prawn" of Irish fisheries. But for ecological significance there was an even more important proposal: a ban on the use of gill-nets to the west of Ireland and Scotland in depths of 200m (656ft) and beyond.

Only weeks before, on a visit to Ireland, the EU Fisheries Commissioner Joe Borg had been shown pictures of huge bundles of gill-net, studded with dead, decaying fish, dumped in the ocean and caught up in the trawls of Irish fishermen. But this was no news to him. The appalling story of deep-water "ghost fishing" has been building for a decade and is documented by the Deepnet Project, instigated by Norway's Directorate of Fisheries and enlisting our own Marine Institute and Bord Iascaigh Mhara (BIM).

Despite finding what it calls "a deep reluctance to talk about this fishery, in fact almost an unwritten law of silence", the recent Deepnet report indicts a ruthless, wasteful and largely unregulated fishery.

Even if the new ban is effective - this in waters beyond the reach of any national inspection or control - the legacy of lost or abandoned nets is severe, and a crime against nature in any reasonable eyes.

The perpetrators are mainly Spanish trawler owners, registering their vessels in the UK or Germany or non-EU countries such as Panama. Many of these are old, in poor condition and crewed by badly-paid Moroccans, Spaniards and Portuguese, working in shifts on trips lasting up to eight weeks. Up to 40 of the trawlers are fishing off Ireland, some changing the boats' names repeatedly over the years (one as many as seven times).

Their target species are monkfish (pictured right) and deep-water sharks, the latter fished originally for their livers but now for a market for fillets in Spain and France. The fishing system sets huge numbers of gill-nets on the sea-bed - a total of perhaps 250km per boat and far more than could be carried on a single trip. The idea is to lift the nets every three to 10 days, but this often becomes impracticable. At a "soak time" of 10 days, some two-thirds of the monkfish catch is unmarketable and is dumped.

At any time between 5,800 and 8,700km of net is constantly fishing and a lot of it is lost when bad weather intervenes. There is also routine discarding of sheets of net for various reasons (not least because it may be illegal monofilament net) - perhaps 30km per trip, cut away from the head-ropes and foot-ropes and often tied up into large balls and dumped in the sea.

There have been only sporadic attempts to retrieve lost nets - understandably, given the great areas of ocean involved. The Deepnet report urged annual retrieval surveys, and BIM made the first one over 20 days last autumn, using the Killybegs trawler India Rose and helped by the Naval Service. It surveyed grounds at Rockall and around the Porcupine Bank, retrieving lost and damaged nets containing "huge catches" of crabs and decaying fish, along with ropes and cables and even an entire lost trawl.

In one small area south-east of Rockall, seemingly abandoned gill-nets amounted to a combined total of more than 300km. According to the Naval Service, which regularly patrols the area, they had not been hauled in more than eight months by the vessel that had set them (not in itself illegal).

The targeting of deep-sea sharks has had a catastrophic effect on species such as the leafscale gulper shark and Portuguese dogfish, which mature late, have few young and give birth to them live. Their stocks are thought to have fallen by 80 per cent in less than 10 years. Even with the moratorium that the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) has called for, the ghost nets will continue to take their destructive toll.