How can Ireland restore its lost realms under the sea?

The sea around Malin Head in Donegal is a hotspot for basking sharks — up to 75 have been seen in a single sighting, feeding on plankton. And to the north are the island’s largest herring spawning grounds.

I didn’t know that. Or that, in Galway Bay, a large haddock spawning and nursery ground is a big patch of deep mud off the Aran islands.

Off the south coast and running parallel there’s a cod spawning ground 130km long and 25km wide — one of only two in Irish waters. And way off to the southwest is the Pendragon Basin, where deep-diving whales feed in summer and the calls of the blue whale can be heard 200km away.

Such offshore insights are from Revitalising Our Seas, a report just published by Fair Seas, a coalition of leading environmental NGOs and networks. The group is pressing the Government to designate at least 30 per cent of Irish waters as Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) by 2030. The Government ambition is 10 per cent “as soon as is practical”.

Michael D Higgins: ‘What I had was a form of mild stroke. It didn’t affect my cognitive abilities’

---

Trapped and starving, two families in Gaza Strip try to keep their children alive

---

EU could be preparing tougher car emissions rules

---

Leinster provide too many players to the national squad for it to be an equitable system

---

Minister for Heritage Malcolm Noonan, of the Green Party, already has an independent expert report recommending more MPAs, but not saying where they should go. Fair Seas, on the other hand, identifies 16 “areas of interest” that could warrant MPAs, including eight coastal areas from Donegal to Louth.

These incorporate bays and estuaries already protected for wildlife under EU nature directives, but which omit fish and other marine species. The Fair Seas areas log precious habitats such as eelgrass and maerl, but extend offshore to conserve their wider ecosystems and biodiversity, including marine birdlife.

Global reputation

The report’s foreword commands attention. Its author, Prof Mark John Costello, currently with a Norwegian university, has a global reputation in marine conservation. He also set the right course for Ireland.

In the 1990s, then at Trinity College Dublin, his research focused on 20 Irish coastal areas for marine conservation. Its record of 1,400 species covered the bulk of seabed and inshore life and set a base for the current data in the new Fair Seas report. It led to Ireland’s first marine protected areas, under the EU’s habitats directive and still covering only about 2 per cent of the Irish maritime area.

A much-travelled career took Costello to New Zealand’s University of Auckland, where he led the summary report of a global census of marine life. A decade of effort added more than 6,000 marine species from the oceans of the world.

New Zealand has also become a test-bed for the benefits of MPAs. It took 20 years after establishing its first no-fishing zone in 1975, says Costello, to understand the impact of fishing on the food-web.

The fishing out of large fish and crayfish let sea urchins grow bigger and more abundant, grazing down to the rock the kelp forest and other seaweeds that gave young fish shelter from predators. The problem of “urchin barrens” is now widespread globally, and only near-total removal of urchins for food can achieve some restoration of kelp.

New Zealand now has 44 MPAs, reversing long-term declines in fish and shellfish populations. But what should be avoided, says Costello, “is any pretence that all MPAs aim to protect biodiversity in a natural condition.”

Fishing allowed

In global practice, 94 per cent of MPAs allow some fishing, of the kinds that don’t damage habitats, while a core of fully protected MPAs can, by comparison, demonstrate and measure the human effects. “It may seem counter-intuitive,” he says, “but there is no evidence of any MPA anywhere in the world reducing fishery catch”.

There are many examples, however, of MPAs restoring fished populations and repopulating areas around them. Fishers, says Costello, could use them to safeguard breeding populations, just as farmers take care of their breeding animals.

A general acceptance, and even enthusiasm, for more MPAs around Ireland has emerged in public feedback to an expert advisory report on MPAs to the Department of Heritage. Of a remarkable 2,311 submissions, including many from fishers and coastal communities, 99 per cent supported MPAs. Most also backed a 30 per cent cover of the seas by 2030.

This, from independent analysis of the submissions, is all the more striking, since the advisory group had itself quoted a survey of Irish attitudes. That study, of a “representative” 812 people, found a far lower public support for MPAs than in six other EU coastal states — 60 per cent of agreement, against 80-plus figures in Portugal and Spain.

The study group, it said, were largely unaware of the potential benefits of MPAs. Sceptical of both government and industry in the making of marine plans and policies, they “placed more trust in the competency of scientists”.

That, at least, squares with the responses in the latest consultation, along with putting the ecosystem first in MPA restoration.

“We do not know what Ireland’s biodiversity would be naturally,” says Prof Costello. As Fair Seas is urging, something a lot better than we have is worth aiming for.