Irish sea-fishing policies are aiding an environmental disaster and wasting millions of euro of public money, writes Eamon Ryan
The days of fresh cod with chips are almost gone. Cod in the Irish Sea is now on the verge of extinction and the evidence from the Grand Banks in Canada is that once stocks go below a certain level they will never recover, even if fishing is stopped completely. Despite a call from scientists for an end to fishing for cod in Irish waters, our trawlers continue to head out in the vain hope that there might still be some fish out there that have, so far, got away.
This instinct in a skipper to do whatever he can to catch fish can be understood by anyone who has ever held out a rod and line.
However, left unchecked it has led to the massive overexploitation of our sea fisheries as powerful new engines, and new sonar and hauling devices, allow boats hunt down even the breeding stock for the next generation of fish.
The blame for this evolving scandal lies more properly with the politicians who have routinely ignored the scientific advice and instead looked after the short-term interests of the fishing industry.
The madness of this approach is seen in the annual scramble to get as much as possible out of the annual December European Council negotiations on fishing quotas.
The central flaw in this European fisheries system is that it is in effect a self-regulating regime. Individual quotas for boats are allocated by fisheries producer groups rather than by an independent auditing agency.
This makes it almost impossible for naval vessels to know whether boats are fishing above their quota or not. While the regulation logbooks are eventually filled out to match what is officially expected, the actual landing of illegal (known as "black") fish are believed to be a multiple of this legal quota.
Last week a Marine Institute scientist told an Oireachtas Committee that the European Union figures and total allowable catches were not based on science, but on something "plucked out of the air", as scientists no longer believe the landing statistics because of misreporting and under-reporting.
Recent allegations of illegal landings by Irish boats in the Scottish port of Peterhead gave the first public indication of the extent of the problem. Landings from Irish vessels worth up to €40 million were said to have been hidden in underground storage facilities at a fish-processing plant and were never properly recorded.
A further major problem is that fishermen routinely dump 50 per cent of their catch overboard as unwanted dead fish. This is because the fish are too small or may not conform with the quota that a particular boat is licensed to catch.
These "discards" are never officially recorded, but they further reduce the spawning stock for future generations. This makes a mockery of any conservation policies that are being put in place. The fishermen say they do not trust evidence being put forward by the scientists, and at the same time scientists have an almost impossible task, given that so much of current fishing activity goes unreported.
The scandal for the Irish public is not only that we are overseeing one of the greatest environmental disasters of our times, but also that we are wasting hundreds of millions of taxpayers money in the process. The value of the entire legal catch landed in Irish ports in 2004 was only €200 million, while the cost of fishery protection services alone was estimated at some €110 million.
Over the last five years the Government allocated some €50 million of public money for the development of our fishing fleet. This included the building of new vessels to target deep-sea stocks, which the scientists are now demanding be closed down as unsustainable fisheries. We have been catching fish that were up to 180-years-old and which take 30 years to reach sexual maturity, which makes them vulnerable to being wiped out in one generation. The fishing has also destroyed many of the mid-Atlantic coral reefs we have only recently discovered as these fisheries trawl nets over one mile beneath the ocean surface.
The Government is now allocating €45 million to provide for the decommissioning of the vessels in the same white fish fleet.
Some of the Wexford scallop boats being decommissioned were only given licences in the last five years, when a cap on additional fishing capacity in that fleet had already been recommended.
The Government also spent some €75 million in developing Killybegs port to support the massive expansion of the mackerel and herring fisheries. Some 12 new boats were introduced in the last five years at the same time those stocks were clearly decreasing.
The official 45,000-tonne national mackerel quota could be caught by the 24 supertrawlers based in Killybegs in a matter of days. The Atlantic Dawn alone can carry 7,000 tonnes of fish.
Killybegs is like a ghost town, as landings have dried up since the regulation of the port was tightened up following allegations of illegal quota management by the fleet.
This huge expenditure of public money in supporting a system that is in need of radical reform can no longer be tolerated. It is also in the interests of the fishermen that a more transparent and fair regulatory system exists so that no one boat owner can be seen to have a particular advantage, and so that stocks survive into the future.
A new Sea Fisheries Jurisdiction Bill has been introduced in the Dáil to try and tighten up our enforcement regulations. However, it is believed that Minister for State for the Marine Pat "the Cope" Gallagher has being arguing within Fianna Fáil for a more cautious approach to be taken. The Bill is back for discussion again next week, when it is expected that several new amendments will be proposed which could weaken its provisions.
It is a scandal that anyone would want the current situation to continue rather than being dramatically reformed and overhauled.
If we keep going the way we are at present, we will end up with nothing other than plankton and chips on our menu.
Eamon Ryan TD is Green Party spokesman for communications, marine and natural resources