A massive fraud which involved Irish trawler owners secretly landing almost €40 million of illegally caught fish at a Scottish port has been reported to the EU Commission and is expected to result in a cut in the Irish mackerel quota this year.
The Scottish Fisheries Protection Agency is currently providing the European Commission with a detailed report of an investigation into illegal landings at the ports of Peterhead and Lerwick over a three-year period.
The Scottish authorities have been in touch with the Department of the Marine in Dublin and Scottish officials have travelled to Ireland to talk to officials here about the serious nature of the fraud. The Irish Government has co-operated with the Scottish authorities in providing the Commission with as much information as possible in relation to the illegal landings.
The department has also supplied the Commission with data compiled by the Marine Institute showing a serious under reporting of catches being landed at Irish ports.
The Commission is expected to cut the Irish and the UK mackerel quotas for this year to take account of the illegal fishing but it is still not clear what the scale of the cut will be.
The Scottish authorities uncovered records of illegal Irish landings at Peterhead of 6,200 tonnes of mackerel last spring, 12,000 tonnes in 2004, 10,000 tonnes in 2003 and 12,000 tonnes in 2002.
The total illegal Irish catch landed in Scotland came to just over 40,000 tonnes over the four-year period. The annual EU quota for this country is 48,000 tonnes.
Commission officials have to decide whether to reduce the Irish quota by just the 6,200 tonnes of mackerel caught last year or by the entire amount of the illegal catch landed in Scotland.
The elaborate fishing fraud involved catches being landed and stored in secret storage facilities at the two Scottish ports.
The investigation comes at an embarrassing juncture for the Irish fishing industry which is currently mounting a fierce campaign of resistance to the Sea Fisheries and Marine Jurisdiction Bill which contains a range of severe penalties for illegal fishing.
The industry has received support in its opposition to the Bill from a number of Fianna Fáil TDs including the chairman of the Committee on Communications, Marine and Natural Resources, Noel O'Flynn. Fine Gael has also opposed the legislation.
Last week there was strong criticism at the committee of the advice given to the Government by the Attorney General, Rory Brady, that criminal penalties rather than fines were the appropriate response to illegal fishing.
The committee sought its own legal advice which backed the claim made by a range of TDs that fines were a more appropriate way of dealing with breaches of the law by trawlers fishing in Irish waters. The Bill has been watered down significantly since it was first published but the cross-party opposition to the measure on the committee is still intense.
The Department of Communications, Marine and Natural Resources is adamant that criminal sanctions are the only way to stop the widespread illegal fishing that is now the norm off the Irish coast involving trawlers from a range of countries but particularly Ireland and Spain.
Minister of State at the Department of the Marine Pat "The Cope" Gallagher is expected to move from his post in the forthcoming reshuffle of junior Ministers. Responsibility for piloting the Bill through the Dáil will revert to Minister for the Marine Noel Dempsey.