Fishermen around the coast have reacted angrily to the issuing of a Ministerial closure order on four key whitefish species.
The order was issued late on Monday by the Minister for Communications, Marine and Natural Resources, Mr Ahern, and was greeted with fury in many ports.
The order closes all fishing for monkfish, prawns, megrims and white pollack by Irish vessels from today. A spokesman for the Minister said the quota had been exhausted, and this was "not unusual for this time of year".
The industry was "well aware of the situation", the spokesman added. The move is expected to affect up to 90 per cent of the whitefish fleet.
However, the Irish South and West Fishermen's Organisation (IS&WFO) said the Department had failed to manage the fishery properly and had dealt a "devastating blow" to the industry in the last good week's fishing before Christmas. It had never experienced a closure on this scale at this time of year, it said.
It is understood that the first indication that the quota on prawns was near exhaustion was only several weeks ago, but the Department was adamant yesterday that industry leaders were given monthly briefings on the state of particular quotas throughout the year.
"Boats have been tied up because of bad weather, and now that prawn prices are very high, they have been banking on this next week," Mr Jason Whooley of the IS&WFO said. "The only option that boats will have is to tie up, or to go to sea and dump any of those four species caught overboard. That is a ridiculous situation," he said. Tensions were heightened yesterday when an Irish vessel was detained in Castletownbere, Co Cork, by a departmental fishery officer for exceeding its monkfish quota.
Normally at this time of year, the Department is able to secure quota swaps with other EU member-states which have not used up their allocations of certain species.
A Department spokesman said that efforts to secure such swaps had not been successful this week.
At a news conference in Dublin yesterday to announce a day of action this Friday over the Common Fisheries Policy review, fishing industry leaders condemned the move. The fact that non-Irish vessels would be able to continue fishing for these species up to six miles off the coast clearly illustrated the case being made in relation to the fisheries policy review generally, the leaders said.