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Ireland and the European Union (short version)

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Ireland and the European Union provides an introduction to the European Union and the tangible benefits of membership for Ireland. The resource provides an overview of the main EU institutions and includes an interview with Ireland's European Commissioner.

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RR7114B FISHING: EEC THREAT TO BRITAIN On February 1st 1971, the European Common Market decided to scrap the 12-mile fishing limit. Britain's 20,000 inshore fishermen fear that it could ruin their fishing grounds if Britain ever joins the Common Market. They accuse the continental fishermen of using nets that are too fine and trawls that are too heavy.

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Tutorial 2 - The Common Fisheries Policy

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Discover the set of rules established to manage European fisheries and how LIFE can make your voice heard! Download the official guide on http://lifeplatform.eu/tutorials/

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1

In the big courthouse just off the main street of Tralee, Co. Kerry, in front of just one spectator, José Francisco Santamaría and his trawler, the Monte San Roque, are getting bailed out.

A few days ago the ship was boarded and inspected by the Irish Navy nearly two hundred miles off Ireland's south-west coast. It was catching monkfish, hake and prawns. The Navy watchers believed its actual fishing locations over the previous several days did not correspond with the entries in its logbook, and they took the vessel into port at Fenit, Co. Kerry.

European waters are not a free-for-all for fishing vessels, or at least they shouldn't be. There are dozens of EU fishing 'areas', rectangles of varying size on the map of the sea, designated by a dizzying array of roman numerals and letters; fishermen are restricted in terms of which species they can catch, and in what quantities, in each. Off west Kerry and Cork, for example, areas VIIj and VIIk stretch south to the 48th parallel, roughly halfway to Spain, and within those areas about half the sole and plaice catch is restricted to Irish-flagged vessels, and Spanish boats have no quota for those species at all. Satellite tracking of vessels is one means by which national authorities monitor activities at sea, but the resources available for enforcement are widely acknowledged to be inadequate.

José Francisco Santamaría, an olive-skinned man in early middle age, is wearing a checked shirt and sports a Groucho Marx moustache-and-glasses combination. As everyone awaits the judge, he is chatting to the heavily pregnant translator. A garda and a fisheries inspector are here too. The prosecuting solicitor, a local man, is engaged in an elaborate welcome-to-Kerry parley with the defence man, who has been sent up from Cork by the Spanish conglomerate that owns the Monte San Roque. Their conversation takes on the usual Gaelic-football inflection that governs interactions between men from those two counties. When sufficient niceties have been observed, the prosecutor mutters that, you know, the bail amount is about €175,000, based on a formula derived from the value of the catch.

'I think 174,768,' the defence solicitor replies. 'And it should be in the account within the next half-hour, if it's not there already.'

Once the judge arrives it's a routine process, complete with a few moments of procedural confusion. Santamaría and his ship are free. An appearance in court is, it seems, a standard occupational hazard in the operations of Atlantic fishing, Spanish style. It may take years for this case to play out.

Two and a half years ago, in Truro, Cornwall, a crown court case against a Spanish skipper took a rather different turn. According to a story in the British industry paper Fishing News in May 2006, José Fernández, aged 63, told the court: 'If you wish to work in charge of a vessel sailing out of La Coruña, you can only do so if you are prepared to cheat.' Fernandez said he had fished since 1976, and said it was 'absolutely invariable' for fishing firms in north-west Spain to demand that skippers ignore EU fishing laws. His British defence team said their enquiries in La Coruña suggested that the port authority and the auction houses were in on the act. Fernández's trawler under-reported its landing of hake and claimed wrongly that most of the fish on board were unrestricted species.

An Irish fisheries official, who spoke to me on condition of anonymity, said the crime being committed over and over again in the seas off the coast of Ireland, as elsewhere, could be summarized simply: 'concentrated rape'. Why is this happening? The simplest explanation is that the demand for the commodity exceeds the legal supply, and so there is money to be made by breaking the law. European fishing fleets have a hungry market to feed. Indeed, in the early 1970s, as Ireland negotiated its entry to the EU, Irish fishermen were promised that a fish-loving continent was their guarantee of a profitable future. The people of Spain annually consume about 50 kilograms per head of fish and other seafood. That's about six times more than the Irish do.

The Spanish fishing fleet contains thousands of ships. In Galicia alone the fish industry employs a quarter of a million people. One of the stories of Spain is the story of a fish-hungry people who have developed the means to feed themselves a kilo of fish a week, and for hundreds of years some of that fish has come from the waters of the European continental shelf that lies around the island of Ireland. When you visit Spain and dine in, say, Taberna Maceiras, a Galician-themed restaurant in Madrid, hundreds of miles from any sea, and you order the rich caldo gallego (fish stew) or the shellfish-studded paella, you are very likely to be enjoying creatures hauled from Irish waters.

Ireland's fisheries, and their relationship to markets elsewhere in Europe, played an important role in this island's pre-modern economic history. Medieval town charters, according to the marine historian John de Courcy Ireland, show that

herring, salmon and fish in general are included in the items upon which the citizens of places like Dublin, Drogheda and Youghal are entitled to raise taxes for the maintenance of their fortifications. An Italian map of Ireland in 1339 reveals the existence of three fishing banks off the coast of Wicklow, while at the opening of the sixteenth century ... another Italian map shows three fishing banks off Arklow, one outside Dublin and two in the vicinity of Ardglass ... As early as 1437 salmon and herrings are found in the list of Irish exports, notably to Brabant (modern Belgium).*

Fourteenth-century records show salt being shipped from Brittany to Donegal for curing herring. 'By the fifteenth century,' de Courcy Ireland writes, 'the Irish sea fisheries were famous throughout western Europe and greedily coveted by foreigners.' Local chieftains benefited from that covetousness, sometimes selectively: in the south-west it seems O'Sullivan Beare turned away English applicants for fishing rights along his coasts, doing a deal instead with Spaniards. And Irish ports and merchants were active in the business: a record from 1567 suggests Waterford was exporting fish to Galicia, Portugal, Andalucia and Biscay.

As England strengthened its grip on the island, such independent commercial relationships became difficult to sustain. By the early seventeenth century, London placed a tax on salmon, pilchards and herring exported from Ireland to places other than England. The Irish industry went into terminal decline, says de Courcy Ireland, 'while French, Spanish, Scottish and English fishermen throve from fishing in our waters, and the government of the Netherlands was allowed special fishing rights here in return for paying £30,000 to the ever-impecunious Charles I'. Holland, then Europe's commercial maritime nation par excellence, was keen to move beyond the herring-above, cod-below duopoly of its own seas and exploit the variety of Irish waters, especially salmon, hake, pilchards, ray, conger and ling - the last a source of valuable oil.

Ireland's own fishing slumped to a subsistence level in a few coastal centres. The myth that Irish people neglected the seas during the Famine is corrected by figures from 1846 that suggest there were about 113,000 men and boys engaged in sea-fishing - 20,000 more than just a year earlier - on no fewer than 19,883 boats. They were, of course, very small boats, not capable of suddenly feeding an entire nation. De Courcy Ireland accuses Ireland's leaders from the mid nineteenth century onwards, in London and Dublin, of a 'trahison des clercs ... turning their backs on the sea'. By the beginning of the Second World War, Ireland had 'an insignificant fishing industry in a state of rapid decay'.

In the 1960s that began to change. Bord Iascaigh Mhara (BIM), a state agency established in 1952 to encourage the development of the industry, began to get serious under what is universally regarded as the dynamic leadership of Brendan O'Kelly, promoting both fishing and fish-eating and prioritizing the development of several key ports. There was rapid growth by the early 1970s, but still the industry had barely entered adolescence, let alone maturity, when it had to deal with Ireland's entry to the European Economic Community.

The seas near Ireland were still being fished by our European neighbours. Under existing agreements, some foreign fleets could fish to within three miles of the Irish coast; for the rest, the limit was set at twelve miles. The local view was that the Irish industry needed a substantial exclusive zone in order to prosper. But the Common Market had already decided, in 1970, on the principle of equal access to all waters. When, during the Brussels negotiations in 1972 for Ireland's EEC accession, Brendan O'Kelly spoke up for a more restrictive system, foreign minister Patrick Hillery had him sent home. That moment represents, for fishermen, a betrayal of their interests that rankles to this day: the story is told again and again up and down Ireland's coasts.

Joey Murrin, from Killybegs in Donegal, was one of twenty fishermen protesting outside the Department of Foreign Affairs in Dublin as those negotiations drew to a close. With so few protesting, and tens of thousands of farmers marching in enthusiastic support of EEC membership, he knew 'we hadn't a hope' of convincing the government that Ireland's seas should be kept for Irishmen to fish. A few years later Murrin found himself around a table with the minister for foreign affairs, Garret FitzGerald, as Ireland began to plan how it would negotiate its way into a new European 'common fisheries policy' that would go beyond the principle of shared seas and attempt to make a rational division of the stock, based at least in part on the existing catches of each national fleet. The meeting was abandoned after twenty minutes when FitzGerald discovered his civil servants didn't have adequate statistics. 'We were unprepared, to say the least,' Murrin recalls. Meanwhile, as John de Courcy Ireland writes, 'People were beginning to realize, on newspapers at home and in the head offices of foreign fishing fleets, that the waters around Ireland held the only fishing grounds left in Europe which were not seriously overexploited.'

Brendan O'Kelly told the Irish Times in 1976 that a quota system would be unenforceable, and 'might do great harm and might even be a disaster in some coastal areas'. He added: 'All this is brought about because EEC countries destroyed their own waters by overfishing. They must not be allowed to destroy our fishing grounds too.' O'Kelly's preferred solution was the creation of an exclusive Irish fishing zone extending fifty miles from the coast. Incredibly, given EEC agreements, fisheries minister Paddy Donegan actually attempted to impose such a zone in 1977, but the plan was rapidly shot down in the European Court of Justice.

Meanwhile, the EEC extended the waters under its jurisdiction to 200 miles off the coasts of member states, from the previous twelve miles, and in 1983 the Common Fisheries Policy came into effect. Conservation of stocks was one aim of the new quota regime, alongside management of the market and of potential rivalry between nation states. At national level the quotas would be divided among regionally based producers' organizations (POs). The POs would in turn divide those quotas among their member-skippers, each successive division carrying the weight of law: for a skipper, his annual letter from the PO is his licence to catch.

With 20 per cent of the EEC's waters, Ireland got about 4 per cent of the overall catch. Joey Murrin describes this state of affairs with an analogy: 'Imagine a farmer with a hundred good acres, but his neighbour comes in and farms it and takes away the produce.' Another way of looking at it, though, is in terms of the Irish fishing fleet's activity before the advent of the Common Fisheries Policy: the 4 per cent quota allocated to Ireland represented an increase on the fleet's actual share of the catch at the time. France - a major European power with a much larger fishing industry - got about a third of the overall EEC catch. Spain, though not yet part of the community, was given some rights based on its traditional fishing in waters belonging to EEC member states, including for species it didn't traditionally catch, putting it in a position where it could, for example, swap blue-whiting quota for hake quota, a permissible transaction between states. After Spain joined the Common Market in 1986 its quotas were expanded; as the years went by Spanish companies bought up parts of the French-flagged fleet, and with them parts of the French quota.

The problem, in retrospect, was less the percentage breakdowns between states than the cumulative quotas of individual species. Member states had, naturally, tended to inflate their own statistics when they went into Common Fisheries Policy negotiations, with the result that the combined allowable catch of individual fish species exceeded the historical catch. Now those inflated numbers had the weight of law, with the implied directive: Go out and catch 'em.

2

The waterfront of Dingle, Co. Kerry, on a rainy day as the summer winds down, is a grim spot. On the pier a few tourists mill around, photographing the bronze statue of Fungi, the solitary dolphin that lives in Dingle Bay and has become one of the town's main attractions. There appears to be nothing going on here that bears any resemblance to commercial fishing. The Dingle fleet is down to about seven boats; one burnt-out trawler has leaned against the pier for years now. Around here, the locals complain, there are more fisheries inspectors than there are fishing vessels. In all of Spain, everyone repeats, there are just fifty fisheries inspectors, all based in Madrid.

Locals complain about the Spanish and the EU. But the real context for the decline of the fishing industry in Dingle, and in other Irish ports, is the rape of the seas, and the destruction to Irish fisheries is only a tiny element of the damage that has been done and remains to be done. Throughout the world, entire fishing regions have been depleted to the vanishing point - the disappearance of cod off Newfoundland, and the resulting destruction of centuries-old fishing communities, being perhaps the most famous example. An October report from the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Bank warned that the global fishing industry is unsustainable, with too many boats chasing too few fish; it also said the planet's fishing fleet could be cut in half without reducing the overall catch. EU fisheries commissioner Joe Borg acknowledged in September that stock depletion in European waters was worse than the global average, and that the Common Fisheries Policy is part of the problem: 'In its current form, the CFP does not encourage responsible behaviour by either fishermen or politicians ... The management tools we use reward narrow-minded, short-term decision-making, which has now undermined the sustainability of our fisheries.' The EU is now reviewing the CFP, and is contemplating rebuilding it around limits on fleet capacity, as measured in 'kilowatt days', as a more manageable and enforceable alternative to catch limits.

No one claims with a straight face that Irish fishermen have not been guilty of overfishing offences. But if the Spanish fleet has been committing concentrated rape, then Irish fishermen sees themselves as mere flashers. 'There was a looseness in the industry,' says Martin Howley, a member of the board of the Killybegs Fishermen's Organisation (KFO) in Donegal. For years Irish boats fished over their quotas - quotas that, because of the scale of the industry and a shortage of inspectors, couldn't be consistently enforced in ways that made them meaningful for conservation. Howley uses the past tense, but as recently as September a fishmonger in the south of the country gave a wink and told me the cod he was selling was landed when the skipper knew the inspector wasn't around. And with the confessions come the rationalizations: 'One Dutch trawler discards more than we're supposed to have overfished in a year,' says Howley.

The annual process by which total catch allowances are recalculated is known mockingly as the 'Christmas panto'. At a meeting every December in Brussels - one that invariably runs through the night - the science meets the politics, and more often than not the latter wins. The gathered ministers treat the scientific evidence about fish stocks as though it were the enemy's initial negotiating position, not a statement of marine reality. Joey Murrin recalls a session in Brussels in the late 1990s. Fisheries minister Michael Woods woke him in the middle of the night with the good news: having hitched its boat to the powerful Dutch interest, Ireland was going to benefit from an overall 10 per cent increase in the total allowable catch of mackerel. Murrin asked the nonplussed minister: 'Where will they get the fish?' Murrin is contemptuous of what he calls 'paper fish', the extra 10 per cent here or 20 per cent there that are demanded by the industry and essentially invented by politicians to placate fishermen - but are not, in reality, capable of being fished in a manner consistent with conservation.

Whatever about the utility of the quotas as set, there is no doubt whatsoever that in the past five years the numbers of inspectors - a corps of professionals, employed by the state - and inspections in Ireland have increased dramatically. As offences have been discovered, the Garda have increasingly been brought into play. Irish boats are more likely to face inspection of their catches in Irish ports than the foreign boats that may be landing fish beside them, for the simple reason that locally based inspectors are more likely to be on top of Irish boats' quotas.

In every fishing port in Ireland the theory thrives that a coterie of civil servants in Dublin is keen to get rid of Irish commercial fishing, leaving the waters to the big EU players and the Irish ports to pleasure-boaters and tourists. The recent Cawley Report on the industry puts it understatedly: 'A poor working relationship exists between the industry and its policymakers.'

The conspiracy theory gets legs from the expense that those policymakers have gone to over the past decade in expanding the inspection regime, while the industry itself has been in decline. Martin Howley complains that there are twenty inspectors based in Killybegs, where, thanks to reduced quotas, the fleet is tied up on the piers from St Patrick's Day to the second week of October. (The winter months are the best that remain for fishing the Killybegs staple, mackerel. And yes, that tie-up means inspectors and fishermen have little to do for half the year other than glare at each other.) Among the inspectors, he says, 'you've got older guys who are ex-fishermen, but then you've also got younger guys who are looking for their stripes and rub people up the wrong way.' When you're trying to get a fresh product to market, the prospect of an inspector taking the time to pick through your boxes for banned species and to weigh each element of your catch is likely to be a bit of a bad-rub, all right, especially if you're convinced that your bigger foreign counterparts are rarely subject to any equivalent trouble.

Howley cites Norway, which is not a member of the EU, as the best-practice model. 'Norway has quality-control officers, not counters and weighers,' Howley says. 'They catch abuse, where it exists, by following the money, inspecting 10 per cent of the fleet each year, with a full audit.' As a result, he says, 'There's no black[-market] fishing in Norway.'

Meanwhile, Irish fishermen see Spanish and French boats fishing in spawning grounds for key species, feeding their domestic markets for small fish.

3

Some one hundred and fifty miles off the west coast of Ireland, where the sea on the continental shelf is no more than a couple of hundred metres deep, a dozen trawlers have lowered their nets, seeking demersal fish - those species that stay mostly near the bottom of these waters. (These are often called 'whitefish' and are the mainstay of the Irish industry other than in Killybegs, where the boats specialize in catching surface-dwelling 'pelagic' fish.) Right here it's mostly hake, thousands of them spotted by the sonar on the boats above. Down near the sea bed the fish swim, their direction determining whether or not they will swim into a net and to their deaths.

The Irish boats are supposed to be using nets with a mesh no finer than 120 millimetres. Juvenile hake can dart between the weave of these nets and live to swim another day. But the Spanish and French boats have a derogation from the rules, based on the eating habits in their home countries, that allows them to use 100-millimetre mesh and catch some of the smaller fish. A few trawlers out here may even be using a still-finer mesh, 85 millimetres, catching everything that swims. Sometimes, if they are concerned about inspection at sea or in port, they will drop the too-fine nets to the sea floor when they have caught their fill, abandoning the evidence of their abuses and ready to show a set of legal nets in their place. Hundreds of kilometres of nets lie on the ocean bed here, wreaking further havoc on a marine environment already devastated by overfishing. To make matters worse, the vessels, having quickly scooped up tonnes of fish, often dump small ones overboard, where, being already dead, they re-enter the marine ecology as food for crabs instead of young fish with a reproductive future. Meanwhile, in their own waters further north and east, the Norwegians use 140-millimetre and 150-millimetre mesh. That's what fishing for conservation looks like.

In his beautiful seafaring ballad 'Shoals of Herring', Ewan MacColl wrote of 'the wild and wasteful ocean', but of course the waste comes from above. The Celtic Sea, off the south coast of Ireland, used to be home to those shoals of herring. Donal O'Driscoll, who fishes from Dunmore East in Co. Waterford, recalls going up to a lookout-point one dark evening in the late 1950s and counting 113 foreign vessels fishing off the shore, just beyond the three-mile limit. 'They were lit up at night, like a city laid out in the sea.'

Taoiseach Jack Lynch said in 1968 that there was herring enough in the Celtic Sea to feed all of Europe. He didn't know what he was talking about: six years later the stocks were so depleted that herring fishing was banned there. The successive restrictions that have followed in more recent times, based on concerns about stock depletion as well as attendant ecological damage, notably on the where and how of fishing cod, tuna and salmon, have taken their toll on fishermen across the EU, not least in small Irish communities.

The tiny village of Brandon on the north side of the Dingle peninsula is one of Ireland's genuine old-time fishing communities. Steve McDonagh writes that 'a century ago as many as a hundred canoes used to fish from here, in addition to several larger craft, bringing in mackerel which were cured on the quays by women and children. The salted mackerel were sent in large quantities to North America ...'* As recently as the late twentieth century Brandon was home to lucrative fishing within handy striking distance of shore.

Above Brandon Pier on a warm evening a retired skipper who prefers not to be named drains a pint of lager and recalls a more recent local boom-time, in the 1980s and '90s, when the albacore tuna were thick in the water seventy miles off the coast, Ireland had a healthy 3,000-tonne quota and you could spend the summer hauling them in. (Another man, a deckhand on other boats, told of getting paid in thick envelopes of untaxed cash in those glorious tuna days.)

'You could land away,' the skipper says. 'It was open house.'

Then it stopped. The tuna quota didn't vanish - in fact it grew. But the EU ban on netting tuna - in favour of a long-line technique that protects dolphins but that our fleet, unlike the Spanish, has never mastered - means Ireland actually lands less than 10 per cent of its tuna quota. Nowadays nothing is moving around Brandon Pier except a couple of lads drawing cheers from their pals with their leaps into the cold sea.

The abuse of the fishing environment has come so easily to fishermen. Indeed, sometimes it seems as thought it were the default position. Joey Murrin from Killybegs tells a sad tale: 'Fifteen or twenty years ago I had an office in the KFO, and a radio beside my desk where I could listen to the fishermen. I'd hear them say the likes of: "I have sixty boxes - I might bring in six or seven boxes out of that."' The rest of the catch, small fish deemed not worth bringing in, but hauled up nonetheless in those convenient 85-millimetre nets, were tossed over the side, dead. 'It's going to take a long time to recover from that,' Murrin says.

If most fishermen are, unlike Murrin, in a state of at least partial denial, then most consumers remain ignorant of the shocking extent to which the seas have been depleted. As the Guardian reported earlier this year:

When chef Rowley Leigh appeared on [BBC] Radio 4's Food Programme last week singing the praises of the anchovy, he said the best specimens 'came from the Cantabrian coast, that bit of the Bay of Biscay on the north Spanish coast'. But those fisheries have been closed for some years after overfishing.

4

Kenmare Bay, as well as being one of the most beautiful spots in Ireland, is also a rich marine environment. As Kieran Lyons stands at the back of a small motor boat, steering it across the glassy waters where the mountains of the Iveragh and Beara peninsulas are reflected, under a small stone bridge and away from the shore, he is confident that the plastic-mesh 'pots' piled up in front of him - each about three feet high and a foot in diameter - will fill with shrimp, again and again, as the autumn stretches away. Later he'll worry about baiting them, then about hauling up the shrimp. Today, in August, is all about choosing the right spot and tossing the pots into the relatively shallow water, with lines and buoys attached so they can be drawn up later.

Apart from a few that he'll throw into the car to bring home and share with his wife, none of Kieran's shrimp will be eaten in Ireland. His is a small operation, but the good shellfish in these waters have not escaped the attention of Éire Nova, a subsidiary of the Spanish company Pesca Nova, which has a big factory operation on the outskirts of nearby Castletownbere. His shrimp will end up on Spanish tables.

He's got six hundred pots out here. Pesca Nova will supply bait, then pay for his shrimp, and they'll send a van to his landing spot to collect them. On a good day in the autumn Kieran and his partner can haul up more than 10kg of shrimp from a twenty-pot line. On a good day he'll get to about fifteen of his lines. Last year, with Pesca Nova paying upwards of €11 per kilo, a good day meant grossing upwards of €1,500? 'That'd be a good day. There's plenty of bad ones.' And this year the days have got worse: the market is poor, and Pesca Nova is insisting that Kieran sort through his pots, tossing back smaller shrimp. He knows that this makes sense in many ways, not least ecologically, but with the company now paying only €7 or €8 per kilo, he finds himself working harder and earning perhaps a third of what he made last year.

Despite the sheltered waters, there's a buccaneering air about this fringe of the Irish seafood industry. Perhaps it's the neighbours suspiciously watching from a nearly bluff to see where Kieran drops his pots: there are no clear turf rights out here, and it's every man for himself. Kieran has a licence but his catch is not subject to any quota.

Whole sections of this bay are criss-crossed with mussel beds, where the shellfish are being farmed. Kieran steers his boat between lines of buoys and drops his pots nearby where he reckons the wild shrimp will be roaming to avail of the mussel farm's juiced-up, nutrient-rich environment. The water is pretty healthy around here now - if the deliciousness of the mussels available at a shoreside pub is anything to go by. But it hasn't always been that way. A couple of big metal rings mark the spot where salmon was farmed here some years ago. After a couple of poor seasons the salmon farming was abandoned, but not before the locals became worried about the possible damage to the food in these waters from sea-lice and the chemicals used to control them.

Fishermen believe the recent ban on drift-netting for salmon was inspired as much by the political clout of the leisured gentlemen who angle them out of Irish rivers, and of the tourism interests who attract them, as by concern for preservation of the species. Such tourism is not taken lightly by the Irish government, and commercial salmon fishing was never more than a part-time fishery for the low-clout inshore fleet, the men who would otherwise live most of their lives on land and perhaps catch some lobster. At Brandon Pier the men recall how they would abandon their turf-cutting for a thirty-day season of fifteen-hour days netting salmon.

The men are convinced the ban on drift-net fishing for salmon would be unnecessary if only there were a political tolerance for the necessary measures to get rid of seals. 'Kill all the seals,' is a frank policy recommendation from one. 'Or give them the morning-after pill,' suggests another. Seals are an annoyance in the shrimp game - they can occasionally get into the pots - and they are worse with salmon. Kieran recalls, from his trawler days, nets full of chewed-up salmon, then some with only the head bitten off, then a few where a near-satiated seal had just nibbled off the skin, rendering the fish unfit for sale.

Salmon-farming needn't make the mess that it did in Kenmare Bay. Marine Harvest, an Oslo-based company, controls close to half the Irish farmed-salmon market, with farms in Donegal for its 'premium' range - that's the ordinary stuff - and at Clare Island in Mayo for the organic range. The differences between the two ranges relate to their feed and to the density of the fish in their cages. Like other farmed salmon, they are fed principally on fish-meal; although critics complain that this is a waste of fish, the industry says the meal is made from 'bycatch' that wouldn't otherwise reach the human food chain - and that, moreover, salmon are far more efficient processors of feed than other farmed animals.

All of Marine Harvest's fish earns the French Label Rouge, a quality mark originally created for poultry reared on pasture. The Mayo fish further qualify for the rigorous French organic standard, AB. The French connection is not an accident: French consumers, and costly French quality certifications, are at the heart of Marine Harvest's marketing strategy. Irish consumers may continue to ask for 'wild' salmon, but elsewhere the word 'Irish' will do fine. This may have something to do with Ireland's perhaps unjustified green image in foreign markets, in the 'Ah, Kerrygold' sense. French housewives may see the word 'Irish' and assume the salmon has been fished wild out of pristine Atlantic waters. In any case, Marine Harvest's pursuit of quality marks has nothing to do with deceiving consumers, but rather with establishing that 'Irish' farmed salmon has some especially desirable qualities.

As another small motor boat weaves between large cages in Mulroy Bay off the shore of the Fanad peninsula near the northernmost tip of Donegal, hundreds of thousands of young fish are living up to the (possibly apocryphal) Latin origin of the word salmon - salmo, or leaper. Not only the water but the air above its surface is thick with pink-bellied fish throwing themselves around with crazed abandon. Two per cent of the volume of water in these 'premium' cages is fish flesh; to qualify as organic it would have to be half that density. These fish will never swim upriver - indeed, part of their unnatural life-cycle involves being shifted around in tanker-trucks - but there seems to be room in there for the creatures to express some part of their essential salmon-ness. Strong tides from the north Atlantic do much of the hygiene work, and also ensure the fishes' muscles are toned to something like a desirable firmness. Another set of cages in nearby Lough Swilly lie fallow at the moment. Boosters insist that this sort of setting means that Irish farmed salmon is comparable to the wild stuff. And with nature doing so much of the work the costs are not prohibitive - just as well when consumers expect to buy salmon, like other food, at absurdly cheap prices.

Ireland produces as much farmed salmon in a year as Norway produces in a week. That, in turn, is a fraction of the overall aquaculture of China, which accounts for 70 per cent of the world's farmed fish. In 2007 farmed fish constituted more than 40 per cent of global fish consumption, and there is no prospect of the small pockets of consumer resistance holding back the tide. The French EU presidency called in September for more EU development in this area - at present just 11 per cent of EU fish production is farmed, and this sector constitutes only 2.5 per cent (and falling) of global aquaculture.

But no one at the moment is pushing hard for very dramatic expansion in Ireland's aquaculture industry, which has in fact contracted since its peak in 2002, hit by imports (salmon from Norway, mussels from Chile) as well as mismanagement and disease. There appears to be potential in rainbow trout and cod, and in shellfish: Ireland grows mussels and oysters as fast as or faster than anywhere else in Europe. It's a small industry, with perhaps 1,900 direct and indirect jobs, and the most ambitious talk is of maybe doubling that figure.

5

There's a buzz about the waterfront in Castletownbere. Colin Farrell is in town making a Neil Jordan movie about a fisherman who thinks he's caught a mermaid in his net. Tourists mill about hoping for a glimpse of someone famous, or they grab the ferry across the perfect little harbour to Bere Island.

But the buzz can't hide the changes in the town's economy. It's not the same place it was, say, twelve years ago, when on the dreary main street that lies right beside the busy pier complex you could find a SuperValu that was among the best-stocked in Ireland, full of tasty luxury foods - handmade pastas, imported and artisanal cheeses, undreamed-of between here and Mount Merrion. The air of cosmopolitanism came not just from the many Spanish fishermen and their families who had settled here - they're still around - but from all the money around the place. That was the 1990s, the boom time, when nets full of tuna and salmon supplemented the whitefish catches that might or might not stick strictly to their legal limits. Nowadays, the salmon and tuna are gone and, with stocks collapsing, whitefish quotas are both much reduced and much more tightly enforced for Irish vessels. The SuperValu is still there, but you're lucky to find a block of cheddar in it. The new art gallery facing the pier suggests that hopes for the local economy lie in upmarket tourism rather than fish.

Donal O'Driscoll and his four brothers settled here in the 1950s, when there was just an old wooden pier. Castletownbere's port is sheltered, and you can come and go at all tides. In the early days the O'Driscolls didn't go far: you could catch whiting, pollock, cod and hake within three miles of the shore. The Spanish would fish right up to the three-mile limit, mainly catching their beloved hake. There was little sense of competition - Ireland still hardly had an offshore fleet to speak of. But this place was a natural pick to be one of Ireland's five main fishing ports when BIM set out its strategy for a brighter marine future.

There was no ice plant locally for years - they had to bring in ice from Cork - and the Spaniards didn't land their catches at Castletownbere until the 1970s, when the pier was expanded. Nowadays, the main activity follows a peculiar rhythm: in a typical week O'Driscoll can look out his window between Thursday and Saturday and see as many as thirty Spanish-owned trawlers (sometimes French-flagged, five of them even Irish-flagged) come into the harbour, with, among other things, hake they've trawled and monkfish caught on long lines that can hook thousands of fish at a time. Most of the catch is loaded directly into refrigerated trucks that quickly hit the Cork road en route to Spain.

When Pesca Nova set up here in the early 1970s, the fisheries minister, Brian Lenihan, said it would bring 120 jobs. O'Driscoll says it never reached forty. The local Spaniards are well liked, he says; Spaniards crew on Irish vessels and no one takes exception, 'and anyway a crewman has nothing to do with what his boss is doing'. But the town's transformation from Irish fishing hub to Spanish transit point has hit like a winter storm. At the peak in the '90s the local fishing co-op - the company, linked to the PO, that buys its members' fish - had a membership of sixty. A private alternative, Fast Fish, had another ten to fifteen boats. That was more than seventy boats, sizeable trawlers of seventy to eighty feet in length. 'Now there's not a third of that,' O'Driscoll says. And there is more decommissioning to come, this time a big tranche, officially subsidized and affecting most of the ports in Ireland: the industry is in the midst of negotiations that will see half of Ireland's whitefish fleet taken permanently out of action. (O'Driscoll's own hope now is to get a bigger boat and move out of whitefish into winter pelagic fishing.)

Within the space of a single generation, the vicissitudes of the fishing industry have transformed Castletownbere from sleepy backwater to officially sanctioned magnet-port to post-industrial strip in need of prettification. An official who watched the catastrophe unfold says its latter stages got no attention in Dublin: 'During the Celtic Tiger no one gave a shit about the decline of these communities.'

6

Killybegs, on the south-west coast of Co. Donegal, has a few architectural highlights, such as the big white house that overlooks the harbour and accommodates the KFO, but its air of spatial disorder makes it appear immune to prettification. Much of the town sprang up with the ad-hoc planning that marked the 1980s, when Killybegs was the centre of a virtual gold rush. Many of the big local fishermen came here from other parts of the country.

'We had money when everyone else in Ireland was struggling,' says Martin Howley, sitting in his office in the white house. 'Factory workers were doing hundred-hour weeks.'

The fishermen of Killybegs essentially invented the Irish pelagic industry in the 1970s. 'If we hadn't, Ireland would have no pelagic quota,' Howley boasts. Whereas Ireland didn't have enough of a record in catching whitefish to stave off the French and Spanish, the rapid development of the Killybegs fleet meant the country had a pelagic catch to point to when the quotas were being shared out in Brussels for the Common Fisheries Policy in 1983. Ireland now has over 16 per cent of the EU pelagic quota, based on the 1983 share-out and on the variations in the total allowances for various species that have taken place since that time.

The Norwegian-built pelagic boats tied up in the harbour here are of a different order from the whitefish trawlers of the rest of Ireland. They are not for day-trips to the shoals; they are more like factories on the sea, with high-tech fish-targeting equipment and sluices that carry the fish, mackerel mostly, into refrigerated sea-water tanks below deck. Without such tanks, it seems, there is little point in landing pelagic fish, which otherwise get too damaged in transit. Twenty-one of the twenty-three boats in Ireland's pelagic fleet are here. With quotas falling - mackerel down 50 per cent in the last five years - they are now out about one hundred days a year, of which perhaps thirty days actually involve nets in the water.

During the gold rush - the extraordinary confluence of supply, demand, improved fishing technology and then, for a time, ample quotas - Howley was away at sea for perhaps 330 days per year. 'My kids grew up and I didn't see them.' It's not surprising that family breakdown is a common Killybegs story.

Howley freely admits that none of the trawler owners came from local fishing stock: he himself came from Mayo. No, none of them are passing on the business to their children. Forget any romantic notions about fishing as a sacred inheritance. Around here it's a flame that burned all too brightly for just one generation: the declining stocks and quotas mean the pier here is not the magnet it was.

But the flame hasn't entirely burned out. There is widespread agreement that there is still a future for pelagic fishing in Ireland. Unlike with the whitefish fleet, there is no decommissioning scheme for Ireland's pelagic fleet, and the fishermen aren't demanding one. The species they fish - pelagic fish include herring, sardine, anchovy and mullet, but around here it's mostly mackerel - are surviving and there are hopes for their strong recovery.

In Donegal the main competition comes from Holland, the long-time EU leader in this field, and from non-EU states. Dutch-owned boats flying various flags catch probably half the EU pelagic quota. Dutch companies also dominate the wholesale market for pelagic fish: a lot of the fish caught and processed in Killybegs is bought by the Dutch. Dutch boats come here to the port and take processed mackerel away. (National quotas are irrelevant after the fish are landed.) There are five pelagic fish processors in Killybegs, but that is down from twelve just a few years ago.

The Dutch pelagic dominance does not spark the same resentment as the Spanish do with their massive whitefish role further south, partly because in the pelagic industry there are big non-EU players who must, it seems, be resisted. 'We work with the Dutch, to fight Norway, the Faroes, Iceland,' Howley says. Norway has successfully negotiated access to a quota of pelagic fish from EU waters, because some of the mackerel spawning areas are in Norwegian waters. 'We get our share after Norway are appeased,' Howley says. 'They've managed their fisheries extremely well - but they're a pain in the arse as far as we're concerned.'

The main ambition for the Killybegs fleet and their EU counterparts is to get officials to increase their total allowable catch of mackerel. 'Out at sea in recent times we have seen a huge resurgence of mackerel. We've got to wait for the science to catch up with the reality - but the lag is typically about three years. That's too long whether the stocks are going up or down.' (In November, after I talked with Howley, the EU fisheries commissioner acknowledged the 'resurgence' by proposing a significant increase in the mackerel catch, along with huge cuts in whitefish catches.) While fishermen's livelihoods have not collapsed to the extent that they have in the whitefish fleet, and the Killybegs skippers probably had some savings to fall back upon, fishermen here have seen their quotas halved, while fuel prices trebled and the price of fish stayed about the same. The equation speaks for itself.

The Killybegs fleet has also faced bureaucratic troubles other than the quota. Ten years ago the pelagic fleet here was under pressure from the EU for being too big, part of the bureaucrats' nascent effort to endorse 'effort management' in the face of failure to enforce catch quotas. With political help from Dublin, Killybegs wiggled out of trouble - and history suggests the town carries more weight politically than other fishing ports. The elevation of Donegal TD Mary Coughlan as Tánaiste is welcomed here, while elsewhere in the country it is believed the county's influence ensures that the focus of Garda overfishing investigations will be further south.

But Killybegs is perhaps most notorious for its bit part in the shameful story of European fishing off the west African coast.

'I recall in 1994 we had a visitor to Ireland representing 19,000 Senegalese in-shore fishermen,' Donal O'Driscoll says. 'He came here to ask us to please ask our MEPs to stop EU money going to Senegal to buy fishing rights there.' This seemingly strange tale of unwanted Third World 'aid' - the purchase of fishing rights from poor African countries has been accounted by the EU as aid spending, and is scarcely unique in its unhelpfulness to the recipient - is worth explaining. Countries such as Senegal and Mauritania get more from the EU fishery budget than Ireland does, money that goes to those nations' governments in return for access by EU boats to the waters off their coasts - a potentially devastating exchange for local fisherfolk. That official arrangement opened the door to a well-documented culture of backhanders that saw many European boats exceed the agreed rules with the connivance of local officials.

An international anti-poverty NGO, Action Aid, released a report in 2008 on the terrible human effect of EU fishing policy in Senegal: 'years of over-exploitation of fishing resources have seriously affected the food security of millions of Senegalese', the charity writes. And plans for further bilateral agreements that include fisheries, and may involve local flags of convenience for European boats, could make things worse.

Some of the travails of African fishing communities at the hands of the big fishing powers would look familiar in Ireland, so there is some small irony in the fact that the poster-boat for EU excesses off the African coast was an Irish super-trawler, the Atlantic Dawn, hailed by the national media when it launched in 2000 as the world's largest fishing vessel, 145 metres long, with a crew of a hundred. Taras Grescoe, in his book Bottomfeeder, choosing his comparison carefully, says the boat 'is on the scale of a good-sized destroyer'.

Its owner, Kevin McHugh, moved to Killybegs in the 1970s after the Celtic Sea herring fishery closed down, and came to embody the Killybegs boom. McHugh was so eager a decade ago to get into Mauritanian waters that he commissioned a Norwegian shipyard to build Atlantic Dawn without having secured an EU fishing licence for it; this was problematic, given that it would be an Irish-flagged pelagic vessel and, as noted above, the Irish fleet was already oversized. After a chaotic birth full of bureaucratic manoeuvres (including the extraordinary decision by Irish fisheries minister Frank Fahey to skirt EU rules by registering this unparalleled fish-catching machine as a merchant vessel), it began to trawl African waters, bringing in more than three hundred tonnes of small fish a day.

'A lot of people would have seen McHugh as wrong,' Howley says. 'If so, everybody else was wrong too. The EU opened the door in Africa for the sake of the Dutch, the Germans, the British to some extent. McHugh saw it open and he went for it.'

When McHugh conceived the idea of the Atlantic Dawn he thought it could spend some months fishing an Irish quota before heading for Africa. By the time it was built the Irish catch was too small for such a boat to be viable locally. So it had to confine itself to Africa, where it was merely the biggest vessel in an EU fleet of forty or more ships.

Even for the biggest fishing boat in the world, working as just one ship in far-flung international waters poses logistical challenges, and the Atlantic Dawn came under pressure from local authorities. In 2005, after a coup in Mauritania, it was apprehended and the operating company fined a quarter of a million US dollars. McHugh died, after a mysterious short illness, in 2006. His dream-turned-nightmare passed into Dutch hands and continues to ply African waters.

7

It's another very windy autumn day in Howth, Co. Dublin, and while the old couples in their anoraks are braving the weather for a walk on the pier, the fishing boats are tied up.

Still, the fish shops are full of fish - virtually none of it local, not much of it even Irish. Few things annoy Irish fishermen more than shops full of imported fish, especially the ones right here by the docks rubbing their noses in it. In Killybegs a little wooden trailer set up within fifty feet of the boats sells haddock from the Faroe Islands and cod from Iceland. In Cork's English Market, the little stall of 'Irish fish only' is down to little other than smoked haddock, and looks rather pathetic next to the impressive heaps of largely imported fish on neighbouring slabs. In Dingle there is Norwegian salmon and Indian Ocean tuna, and locals complain that the crab-processing plant there was killed by cheap imports. All these species used to be fished easily from Irish waters, but Irish catches are now greatly reduced. And with those reductions, the economies of scale that once made it worthwhile for Irish wholesalers and distributors to work with Irish producers no longer apply.

Nick Lynch, a fishmonger based up the road from Howth in Ashbourne, Co. Meath, says the fishermen just don't get it. 'Fishermen's margins are being squeezed by costs, not by imports,' he says, and imports are needed to maintain consumption in Ireland. 'Customers are creatures of habit and want to be able to buy the same species. Restaurants need to be able to keep a particular fish on the menu. Consumers won't just decide to eat a particular fish when fishermen have it available.'

The extent to which consumers really know what fish they're eating is debatable. A New York Times story revealed last summer that, in a sample of sixty pieces of seafood bought in Manhattan, fully a quarter proved to be something other than what they were labelled once subjected to DNA testing.

A piece of sushi sold as the luxury treat white tuna turned out to be Mozambique tilapia, a much cheaper fish that is often raised by farming. Roe supposedly from flying fish was actually from smelt. Seven of nine samples that were called red snapper were mislabeled, and they turned out to be anything from Atlantic cod to Acadian redfish, an endangered species.

'The Irish fishermen who complain don't understand the processing and retailing end of the business,' Lynch says; and some of the others don't seem to particularly care about selling in Ireland. Lynch cites Marine Harvest as, until recently, one of the guilty parties in this respect, uninterested in Irish retail business. (This is a company that boasts of its ability to fly a salmon from an underwater cage in Mayo to a shop shelf in America within a couple of days.)

Martin Howley tends to agree that Irish fishermen aren't getting the best out of their fish. The fairly smooth, mostly Dutch-run chain of commerce for mackerel doesn't apply to whitefish, where 'there is mismanagement of the stock between catch and sale: the gap is much too big'. Indeed, 'mismanagement' is a word that often springs to mind when considering the Irish fishing industry, with the Irish government sharing responsibility with the EU and fishermen themselves.

'What you might call "Olympic fishing" is alive and well in ports around Ireland,' says Richie Flynn, executive secretary of IFA Aquaculture. 'There's a peculiar "the most we can get as quickly as possible" attitude': the temptation to gorge when the going is good is often irresistible. In Norway and Iceland, Murrin insists, the attitude is not the same. 'I met an Icelandic fisherman getting off his boat with four boxes of cod. "That's all?" I asked him. "I left the other four out there," he said.' It wasn't a matter of discarding dead fish but of fishing only the largest cod, and only as many as he needed. The conservation mentality he observed in this fisherman - fishing only what he needed, thinking of the needs of the fish and their future - was, says Murrin, a consequence of his government's conservation policy. 'People will only treat the sea with the respect the government gives it.'

Murrin retired from the KFO in 1999 and speaks his mind freely. When the government set up the Cawley commission to report on the future of the industry, Murrin was one of the three wise men who sat on it. Their document, released in 2007, is a worthy compendium of aspiration, warning, and insistence on the need to cut back the Irish fleet.

'The one thing every fisherman forgets about is the foundation of the industry: fish,' Murrin says. 'Shortage of fish is a real problem, and there is no conservation policy.' Meanwhile, 'unless the science is positive the fishermen never believe it'.

He traces the most recent phase of the tragedy of the seas to the Common Fisheries Policy. At the time it was enacted in 1983, the scientific evidence on fish stocks was poor. 'The quotas bore no resemblance to what was in the sea,' he says, and the misfit was an invitation to ignore the rules - not because the quotas were too low (they generally were the opposite of that) but because it was easy to caricature them as politically motivated and inflexible. When it comes to whitefish he is 'absolutely and totally pessimistic', he says. 'You can't be throwing 65 to 70 per cent of the catch over the side, dead fish, and hope to have an industry in the future ... In 1979 there were twenty-five whitefish boats out of Killybegs making a living fishing Donegal Bay. There's not one in it now. You don't need to be a scientist to know what's wrong.'

A start, he says, would be to ban the dumping of dead fish: boats should be required to bring home all the fish they catch. That would have two effects: scientists would have a more accurate account of what was being caught, and fishermen would be motivated not to catch more than they really wanted to carry home.

In any case, he says, it may be too late. 'I was here when boats were fishing eleven months of the year. Now they're not fishing eleven weeks. This is a European disaster. It needs a European solution. There's more meetings now than there is fish. I'm not aware of any country in Europe with its fleet fishing in EU waters where they're doing well.'

There is no doubt whatsoever in Murrin's mind that half the Irish fleet needs to be decommissioned. But that's only half a solution. 'It's the other half I'm concerned about.'

* This and following quotes from John de Courcy, Irish Sea Fisheries: A History, 1981.

Read more in The Dublin Review issue No. 33 Winter 2008-9

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Where will they get the fish? - The Dublin Review

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1 In the big courthouse just off the main street of Tralee, Co. Kerry, in front of just one spectator, José Francisco Santamaría and his trawler, the Monte San Roque, are getting bailed out. A few days ago the ship was boarded and inspected by the Irish Navy nearly two hundred miles off Ireland's south-west coast.

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VesselFinder is a FREE AIS vessel tracking web site. VesselFinder displays real time ship positions and marine traffic detected by global AIS network.

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Europe - Fishing Industry - EEC - Common Market - 1981

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Thames Televisions 'TV Eye' investigates the effect joining the common market will have on the UK's fishing industry, and also how other countries get around the crippling EEC quota system.

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200 mile rule

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Europedia - The 200 mile rule and EU's fisheries policy

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200 mile rule. Since the end of the Second World War, certain coastal states had begun to eat into the "mare liberum" to reserve for themselves the riches which they held, particularly fish.

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The European Union's Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) was adopted in 1983, with the objective of ensuring that declining fish stocks are exploited responsibly - protecting the environment and the interests of the fishing industry and consumers.

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Management of EU fisheries
What is the Common Fisheries Policy?
The CFP is a set of rules for managing European fishing fleets and for conserving fish stocks. Designed to manage a common resource, it gives all European fishing fleets equal access to EU waters and fishing grounds and allows fishermen to compete fairly.

Stocks may be renewable, but they are finite. Some of these fishing stocks, however, are being overfished. As a result, EU countries have taken action to ensure the European fishing industry is sustainable and does not threaten the fish population size and productivity over the long term.

The CFP was first introduced in the 1970s and went through successive updates, the most recent of which took effect on 1 January 2014.
What are the aims of the Common Fisheries Policy?
The CFP aims to ensure that fishing and aquaculture are environmentally, economically and socially sustainable and that they provide a source of healthy food for EU citizens. Its goal is to foster a dynamic fishing industry and ensure a fair standard of living for fishing communities.

Although it is important to maximise catches, there must be limits. We need to make sure that fishing practices do not harm the ability of fish populations to reproduce. The current policy stipulates that between 2015 and 2020 catch limits should be set that are sustainable and maintain fish stocks in the long term.

To this day, the impact of fishing on the fragile marine environment is not fully understood. For this reason, the CFP adopts a cautious approach which recognises the impact of human activity on all components of the ecosystem. It seeks to make fishing fleets more selective in what they catch, and to phase out the practice of discarding unwanted fish.

The reform also changes the way in which the CFP is managed, giving EU countries greater control at national and regional level.

The CFP has 4 main policy areas:

The CFP also includes rules on aquaculture and stakeholder involvement

The essentials of the new CFP

The new Common Fisheries Policy: sustainability in depth The international dimension of the EU Common Fisheries Policy The European Maritime and Fisheries Fund 2014-2020 Sustainable tools for the world's largest seafood market
Official documents

REPORT FROM THE COMMISSION TO THE COUNCIL AND THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT in respect of the delegation of powers referred to in Article 11(2), Article 15(2), (3), (6), (7) and Article 45(4) of Regulation (EU) No 1380/2013 of the European PArliament and of the Council of 11 December 2013 on the Common Fisheries Policy

Regulation (EU) 2015/812 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 20 May 2015 amending Council Regulations (EC) No 850/98, (EC) No 2187/2005, (EC) No 1967/2006, (EC) No 1098/2007, (EC) No 254/2002, (EC) No 2347/2002 and (EC) No 1224/2009, and Regulations (EU) No 1379/2013 and (EU) No 1380/2013 of the European Parliament and of the Council, as regards the landing obligation, and repealing Council Regulation (EC) No 1434/98

REGULATION (EU) No 1380/2013 OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL of 11 December 2013 on the Common Fisheries Policy, amending Council Regulations (EC) No 1954/2003 and (EC) No 1224/2009 and repealing Council Regulations (EC) No 2371/2002 and (EC) No 639/2004 and Council Decision 2004/585/EC

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fisheries cfp europa european commission european union eu

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The Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) - Fisheries - European Commission

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Management of EU fisheries What is the Common Fisheries Policy? The CFP is a set of rules for managing European fishing fleets and for conserving fish stocks. Designed to manage a common resource, it gives all European fishing fleets equal access to EU waters and fishing grounds and allows fishermen to compete fairly.

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Myth

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It is striking that the policy of protecting Irish industry, which Éamon de Valera's Fianna Fáil was implementing in 1933 coincided with the ending of Prohibition in the United States, but by the early 1960s, the Irish whiskey (see bottom of page) and fisheries industries were struggling and both were insignificant exporters. Today there is resentment in fishing communities about European Union (EU) quotas and conservation measures (including a requirement to land all fish caught) while there is also an enduring myth that other European countries are having a free fish lunch at Ireland's expense.

In the period 1973-2013, the fish landings in tonnes by Irish vessels over 10m in length more than doubled. Based on one estimate of the 1973 data, the landings in the record year of 1995 were five times the level in the initial year of membership of the then European Economic Community (ECC).

According to a 1970 Department of Agriculture report, which was produced in advance of Ireland joining the then EEC in 1973, Irish exports of fish and fishery products in 1968 were valued at £2.7m - less than 1% of total exports in that year - of which £1.3m was consigned to EEC countries and £1.2m to the UK Imports in 1968 were valued at £1.5m of which nearly £0.7m came from the UK mainly as fish fingers and smoked fish.

The Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) said in a 1980 report:

The development of the Irish sea fisheries in the post-war period is evident from the figures for landings of wet fish (excluding salmon) which were only 8,700 tonnes in 1938, compared with 20,000 tonnes in 1963.

While caution is required with the statistics, there was a big jump to 92,000 tonnes in 1972 (see below where the Sea Around Us Project estimate in that year was 78,500) compared with 1.4m in Denmark (ex Greenland) - a similar small country with a reliance on food production.

The numbers employed were significant for coastal communities but not on a national scale. In 1963, 5,588 people were employed: 1,666 (30%) were engaged wholly in sea fishing and 3,922 (70%) were engaged part time. By 1969, the number of full-time sea fishermen had increased by 9% to 1,821, and the number of part-time fishermen had declined by about 3% to 3,810. Total employment in the industry was at 6,800 according to the ESRI.

In recent times, employment has fallen from 15,000 in 1997 to 11,000 (including part-time workers) in the industry: 5,000 in fishing; 1,700 in aquaculture; 2,900 in processing and the rest in ancillary activities (excluding distribution) according to Bord Iascaigh Mhara (BIM - Sea Fisheries Board).

The value of Irish seafood exports in 2014 was €533m - 2.9% of indigenous tradeable exports in the year and 0.26% of total headline exports. Overall, the total sales of seafood both export and on the home market amounted to about €845m.

Trade statistics show that export volume was at 259,120 tonnes and the top export markets for Irish seafood in terms of value were France (€124m), Spain (€60m), UK (€56m), Nigeria (€53m) and Italy (€30m).

UK Trade and Investment reports that Ireland imported €235m worth of seafood in 2014, which amounted to 68,151 tonnes. Its most popular seafood imports in terms of value were tunas, skipjacks and Atlantic bonito, whole or in pieces; other fish, fresh or chilled; salmon; herrings, sardines, sardinella, brislings or sprats, fresh or chilled (excluding livers and roes); crustaceans, prepared or preserved. The top import markets for the Irish market in terms of value are the UK (€145.1m), France (€18.2m), Germany (€16.7m), Denmark (€9.52m) and Netherlands (€5.5m).

The European Commission says that the Irish seafood processing industry is comprised of mostly small enterprises with less than 10 employees.

Indigenous processing is about 5% of total catch in Irish waters and an estimated 80% of exports are commodity traded.

The companies in the sector are dominated by family owned firms and there are 180 registered seafood companies with processing facilities in Ireland according to BIM.

A large proportion of this number are small scale firms with a turnover ranging from €3m to €10m. In addition there is a significant number of artisanal scale operations supplying dispersed local markets such as shops and restaurants. This contrasts with a typical European competitor with a turnover in the order of €50m. Compounding the lack of scale is our geographic position on the periphery of mainland Europe.

Ireland has only two firms with revenues of over €50m.

Denmark with a population of 5.6m compared with Ireland's 4.6m, has a food industry with a high level of innovation and while catches by local vessels have fallen in recent decades, it is the fifth largest exporter of fish and fish products in the world, according to a European Parliament report. Fish related exports including fish meal and fish oil, amounted to about €3bn in 2014 - almost 4% of goods exports and the total food category accounted for 19%. The value of Food, Beverages & Tobacco exports in 2014 was €15.5bn in Denmark and €10.5bn in Ireland.

According to the 2013 annual report of the Sea Fisheries Protection Authority (SFPA), in 2013 Irish vessels were responsible for fish landings of 203,000 tonnes, with a value of €212m. The total landed volume was 280,000 and the value was €302m.

Total landings in 2014 amounted to 294,383 - a breakdown of landings by nationality of the vessel registration will not be available until early 2016 when the 2014 annual report will be published. There were 2,114 Irish registered fishing vessels in 2014 and Killybegs and Castletownbere (Castletown Berehaven) are the chief fishing ports in the country.

Common Fisheries Policy

The genesis of what would become an EEC Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) with access of all member states to EEC fishing grounds, was in the late 1960s with the expected accession of the UK, Denmark, Norway (proposed membership was rejected in a referendum in 1972) and Ireland, in 1973, significantly expanding the EEC's fishing resources. The CFP was launched in 1983,

A 10-year period was agreed in which the accession countries could reserve existing six nautical mile fishing limits exclusively for vessels which traditionally fished in those waters and which operated from local ports.

For part of 1970, Ireland had no ship available to protect its fishing grounds. In 1976 when the EEC followed Iceland in declaring a 200 mile fishing limit, it gave funds to Ireland to commission 3 new protection vessels.

Ireland had no deep sea fishing fleet at the time.

The Sea Around Us Project, based at the University of British Columbia, reconstructed data for Irish waters from 1950 to 2010 that debunks the myth that Ireland sold or lost out on Irish fish catches to other EU after joining the EEC in 1973.

The project's 'reconstructed data' are a combination of official reported data and reconstructed estimates of unreported data (including major discards).

Discarding - the practice of throwing unwanted fish overboard, was estimated at 23% of total catches in 2013, according to the European Commission

Ireland accounted for 28% of the catch in Irish waters (as defined in 1976) in 1973 and it was Norway, a non-EEC/EU member but with access to the internal market, that with Ireland accounted for the main shares from that time.

The Irish catch peaked at 407,000 tonnes in 1995 which gave Ireland a 59% share; Norway peaked at 459,000 tonnes in 2005 giving Ireland a 31% share and in 2010 Ireland had a 60% share with at 260,000 tonnes and Norway was down to 135,000.

The narrative of Ireland being a victim is not borne out by the data.

We started at a low base but there was a jump in fish landings; there was mostly continuous growth in 1980-1995 and likely overfishing as well. Fishermen and farmers got EU funds and Ireland has yet to pay a net penny or cent to the EU budget.

It's foolish to argue that we should have had exclusive use of the 200 mile zone and every other country with a coastline the same entitlement.

This would have created a boom and bust situation in Ireland as unlike the Danes, we would not have had the gumption to establish a sustainable indigenous processing sector that would have also required access to dependable import supplies.

As we noted above, most Irish seafood exports are commodity traded not processed products

The European Commission will give €147.6m to the Irish fishing industry in 2014-2020. The Irish Government is providing an additional €94m in co-funding, meaning there's a total of over €241m available.

Click for interactive chart

Fish consumption

In the past, Irish Catholics ate fish on a Friday as a penance in compliance with an ancient custom and apart from the religious aspect, in West Cork at least, eating fish was also a penance as there was little culinary innovation.

In 1966 Pope Paul VI gave the bishops in each country discretion on applying the ban on eating meat. Over time the change boosted the demand for fish as did issues like health.

The 1980 ESRI report cited above notes on the level of consumption:

Even though fish consumption has increased over the years, Ireland is still one of the lowest fish consuming nations in the EEC. In the year 1962/63, Ireland had a per capita consumption figure for fish of only 5.3 kg (live weight) ; the next lowest consumer was the Netherlands, where ,consumption was 10.1 kg per head. The country with the largest consumption of fish in 1962/63 was Denmark, which stood at 28 kg per person. By 1976, Ireland had increased its consumption of fish to 12.4 kg per capita. Only four other countries, the Netherlands, France and Luxembourg/Belgium, experienced any sustained increase in consumption between 1962 and 1976. In the latter year, Denmark was still top of the league, though consumption had dropped from 37.8 kg in 1971 to 26.0 kg. Between 1962/63 and 1976, consumption per capita in Germany fell from 10.9 kg to 10.2 kg, and it was the lowest per capita fish consuming country in the EEC in 1976. Consumption of fish in Italy remained more or less constant over the period at 11.7 kg, and, in the United Kingdom, per capita consumption fell from 19.1 kg in 1962/63 to 18.1 kg in 1976.

In 2007 the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) published research by economists at the Centre for the Economics and Management of Aquatic Resources, Portsmouth, England, and data on consumption per capita in 28 European countries, including forecasts to 2030 which show Ireland's consumption at about 21 kg per capita and comparable with the UK, Sweden and Denmark. France was a third higher; Spain double the rate; Norway at more than double, and Portugal is at three times.

The Department of Agriculture said in 2011 that the "amount of seafood produced within the European Union, to meet local market demand, has declined substantially over the last two decades. In the 1990's, imports accounted for approximately 40% of demand, whereas today that figure is closer to 65% and is showing no sign of falling."

In recent years Eurostat, the EU's statistics office, has stopped publishing meat consumption per capita statistics because of issues about reliability. Should the comparison be ready to cook meat weight? How to estimate the number of vegetarians etc.?

Ireland's national statistics last published data in respect of 2011 which show a consumption per capita total of 77.5 kg compared with 93.1 in 2001.

This is a comparison from 2007 which showed a per capita total of 125.4 kg for the US (Luxembourg should be ignored as part of its workforce lives outside its borders).

The FAO says that with a growing human population worldwide, the demand for fish and fish products will increase even if the per capita consumption remains at the present world average level of almost 19 kg/year - one third the level of meat. Capture fisheries production has, in general, levelled off. The increasing demand for fish products will drive improved utilization of present resources, which could reduce wastage and divert more fish into food and less to feed. However, the growing demand for fish will, in practice, mainly be met by increased production from aquaculture, thus, also driving the demand for feed.

The Famine

Why Irish people died of starvation in coastal communities of for example West Cork, during the Potato Famine of the 1840s, is often raised, and in her acclaimed 1962 book ' The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845-1849,' Cecil Blanche Woodham-Smith (née Fitzgerald), the Anglo-Irish historian, wrote:

The primitive boats and curraghs in which the Irish fished, combined with the hazards of the 'tremendous coast', made regular fishing difficult; the Irish fisherman could never go out in bad weather, and was often kept on shore for weeks at a time. He then depended for food on his potatoes - though the seas might be teeming with fish, they were inaccessible to him. The difficulties which had prevented a fishing industry from developing in Ireland remained; the poverty of the county, the want of proper boats, the remoteness from a market, the dangers of the 'tremendous coast' in the west. In many places trawling was declared to be impossible, owing to the rocky and foul nature of the sea bottom; in others for part of the season the fishermen had to row twenty-five miles to the fishing grounds; the weather was unreliable, and small boats, curraghs especially, laden with their catch were difficult to bring in when a squall blew up. Fish-curing stations could not operate economically when the supply of fish was not regular, nor did it prove easy to dispose of finished product; a number of stations had cured fish left on their hands.

The winter of 1846/47 was very severe in Ireland and across Europe.

Low priority pre-EEC/ EU membership

Finally, these are the comments of two wise men on the attitude to the industry prior to 1973:

Arthur Griffith, the first leader of independent Ireland as head of the provisional government in 1922, had remarked in 1911:

We dare say the number of public men in Ireland who realise that the sea fisheries of this country could be an industry second only to agriculture might be counted on one hand.

Tim Pat Coogan, the historian and last editor of The Irish Press, in 2009 recounted a conversation that he had with the then fisheries minister in the 1960s:

...a more fundamental cause goes back to that conversation I had with Brian Lenihan (the present finance minister's father) back in the 60s when Ireland was planning to enter the European Economic Community ( EEC) as it was then known. The conversation occurred during an interview I was conducting with the junior minister - that status should have given me a clue - on the prospects for developing the vast untapped fisheries potential of the Irish coastline. Brian, a pleasant man, interrupted me suddenly to ask "Tim Pat! Do you know how many whole time and part time farmers there are in this country?" I did not know exactly but he rattled off the answer correct to a decimal point (around a quarter million, as I remember). Then he asked me did I know how many whole time and part time fishermen there were in the country. "including lobster men, currachmen, and the teacher who goes out in the summer night with a net after a few salmon?" Again I could not reply with certainty but Brian could again answer with pin point accuracy, something just over 9,000 as I recall. "That," he continued, "would hardly elect one Fianna Fáil TD on the first count in a five seater. Now do you get me?"
Marine Institute map second edition Scotch whisky exports at £3.9bn; Irish whiskey exports at €365m Europe's export stars: Ireland and UK as laggards Part 2 Can Ireland reduce its reliance on FDI by boosting Irish firms?
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Pic on top from a Bord Iascaigh Mhara video of fishing off the west coast of Ireland. Bord Iascaigh Mhara: Oyster Farmer

'Muintir na Mara' - the sea people of County Kerry (English language subtitles)

Trafficking in Irish fishing: overseas workers used as cheap labour

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Michael Hennigan, founder, editor, Finfacts

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Irish fisheries industry and myth of EU stealing our fish

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It is striking that the policy of protecting Irish industry, which Éamon de Valera's Fianna Fáil was implementing in 1933 coincided with the ending of Prohibition in the United States, but by the early 1960s, the Irish whiskey (see bottom of page) and fisheries industries were struggling and both were insignificant exporters.

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Minister for Forestry and Fisheries Paddy O'Toole on European Economic Community (EEC) decision to cut Ireland's mackerel quota by eleven per cent. Report shows: interview with Paddy O'Toole on mackerel quota. The reporter is Mary Fanning

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Irish Defence Forces intervene to end protest by fishermen blocking Dublin Port over ban on herring fishing.

The Defence Forces and the Gardaí moved in to end the fishermen's two-day blockade of Dublin Port which seriously disrupted both commercial shipping and passenger ferries.The fishermen were protesting for a lifting of a Common Market ban on herring fishing.

Taoiseach Charles Haughey had warned the fishermen that if they did not end the blockade, there would be action. However, the port entrance was still blocked by a line of fishing trawlers wired together. As such, the green light was given to end the protest and at 6 am the LÉ Aisling moved in to open up the port again.

According to the fishermen, they were given just fifteen minutes warning even though they had made it clear that they would need an hour to disentangle their boats. As the LÉ Aisling moved in driving a wedge through the blockade the trawlers retreated. Air Corps helicopters also joined in the operation.

The two dozen or so trawlers that had put a stranglehold on passenger and freight services to and from Dublin had been forced to abandon their blockade.

The fishermen then called off all blockades at ports throughout the country.

Members of the Irish Army on Dublin's South Wall (1982)

Reporter Joe O'Brien asked a spokesman for the fishermen Brian Crummy why they called off the blockade. Mr Crummy explains that the protest was called off due to the damage that was done to boats and the likelihood of fishermen being injured.

The trawlers were escorted up to Alexandra Basin but Gardaí clarified that the fishermen were not under arrest. Cargo vessels and passenger ferries which had been trapped in Dublin Port were able to leave.

An RTÉ News report broadcast on 21 October 1982. The reporters are Tom McCaughren and Joe O'Brien.

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Irish Defence Forces intervene to end protest by fishermen blocking Dublin Port over ban on herring fishing. The Defence Forces and the Gardaí moved in to end the fishermen's two-day blockade of Dublin Port which seriously disrupted both commercial shipping and passenger ferries.The fishermen were protesting for a lifting of a Common Market ban on herring fishing.

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He has worked with 15 successive government ministers, and most of them were afraid of him. Such is his influence that one former political party leader is known to have had "sudden mood changes" at the very mention of his name. Now Joey Murrin, fishing industry leader, is retiring - "but", he warned at the opening of Fish Ireland 2000 in his home port of Killybegs, Co Donegal, this week, "I'm not quite going away".

In fact, he hasn't even booked a holiday, and won't be clearing his desk at the Killybegs Fishermen's Organisation office in Bruach na Mara for another few months.

His replacement - expected to be a senior official with Bord Iascaigh Mhara (BIM) - will have a hard act to follow. So hard that Mr Murrin is staying on part-time in an advisory role until early next year.

After 22 years as chief executive in the Killybegs Fishermen's Organisation and more than three decades serving at national and international level in fishing politics, Mr Murrin believes it is time to go.

He made his intentions clear several months ago at the Killybegs group's annual general meeting, when he also promised that he wouldn't quit until a replacement had been found. Now that one has, he will step down on September 31st, but will be available for the crucial December fisheries negotiations in Brussels.

A master of the soundbyte, but without any formal public relations training, he has been the envy of many a spin doctor over the years. One such off-the-cuff comment, given in an interview with this newspaper four years ago, referred to the marine sector being "consultant-dominated" at a time when many Government departments were already relying heavily on paid advisers.

"The people who know nothing coming to the people who know everything, picking their brains, charging a lot of money, writing a report, presenting it to the people who know everything and charging them again" was how he described the situation. In short, Murrin-speak for people who "borrow your watch to tell you the time".

Mr Murrin first came to prominence in 1971 at a time when fishermen felt they were getting a raw deal during Ireland's accession to the European Union. He was working as a deckhand as he had done on various boats from 1954 to 1974. Elected secretary of the then Killybegs Fishermen's Association in 1958, he became its chairman in 1973. The following year, he was voted chairman of the Irish Fishermen's Organisation and served for five years.

In 1979, he left to set up the Killybegs Fishermen's Organisation as a producers' body and was also nominated to his first of several terms as director of Bord Iascaigh Mhara. Most observers knew he was destined for politics and, in 1986, the then Taoiseach, Dr Garret FitzGerald, appointed him as chairman of BIM. Dr FitzGerald also asked him to stand for Fine Gael as a European election candidate in Connacht-Ulster.

Though he was unsuccessful, he made serious inroads into a traditional Fianna Fail fishermen's vote. It left him free to continue his criticism of the EU's Common Fisheries Policy, which left Ireland with less than 4 per cent of the catch after signing over what amounted to 16 per cent of EU waters.

As the multimillion Killybegs mackerel fleet grew in size - with the £24 million Veronica owned by his close friend, Kevin McHugh, becoming the flagship in 1995 - so did his influence.

From 1995, he served again as director of BIM. On completion of that three-year term in 1998, he was appointed to the board of the Marine Institute.

During that time, he was heavily involved in the first expansion in 15 years, after a bleak period of tonnage and licence restrictions. Unlike the mackerel sector, the bulk of the national fleet - catching whitefish - had faced cutback after cutback as the EU pursued its relentless "single market" approach. The turning point, as far as influencing Government policy here was concerned, was the loss of six fishermen on board the Carrickatine, a Greencastle, Co Donegal, vessel, in 1995. Whitefish vessels had not only become uneconomic, but unsafe, as skippers leasing second-hand rejects purchased in other member-states were forced to steam further and further out and take greater risks to try and make a living.

The then Minister, Mr Sean Barrett, commissioned a fleet review and a renewal scheme, involving construction of more than 30 new vessels was initiated by his successor, Dr Michael Woods.

"The fishing industry has gone through massive changes since I first went to sea in 1954," Mr Murrin said in Killybegs yesterday at a Killybegs Fishermen's Organisation luncheon attended by the Minister for the Marine and Natural Resources, Mr Fahey. "From the simple hunting operation it was at that time, it has developed into a high-tech, high investment business, with vessels navigated by satellite and fish located and caught using systems undreamed of half a century ago."

He has a few plans, a few "other things I would like to turn my hand to before finally hanging up my sea boots". He will continue on the Marine Institute board, and is a member of the National Salmon Management Commission.

But there is one certainty- his wife, Betty, won't want him hanging around the house. He might have to become one of those dreaded consultants after all . . .

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Murrin says goodbye but has no plans to go fishing

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He has worked with 15 successive government ministers, and most of them were afraid of him. Such is his influence that one former political party leader is known to have had "sudden mood changes" at the very mention of his name.

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A tough few years lie ahead for the fishing industry but there is now at least a glimmer of hope that the problem of declining fish stocks can be turned around, according to the new Donegal Person of the Year, Joey Murrin of the Killybegs Fishermen's Organisation.

Murrin, who started off working on the boats out of Killybegs in the 1950s, has been arguing for the rights of fishermen since the time of the EEC entry negotiations. He has been chief executive of the Killybegs Fishermen's Organisation (KFO) for more than 20 years and is known for his tough talking and direct approach. Strongly critical of the "raw deal" membership of the EU has dealt the industry in Ireland, he has unleashed his anger at successive governments.

In paying tribute recently to former Minister for the Marine, Dr Woods, Murrin said his performance would have to be judged on those of the 13 others who preceded him "and most of these are best forgotten".

Since it was set up in 1979 the KFO, an officially recognised producer body under EU rules, now accounts for one third of the landings of the Irish fishing fleet and represents members from Donegal to Galway.

Murrin says he is confident that Ireland's quota of 70,000 tonnes of pelagic species (mackerel and herring) will increase again this year based on the latest scientific assessment of stocks.

"I was always the first to be sceptical when people said there were plenty of mackerel in the sea, but everybody is in agreement now that stocks are being rejuvenated."

This, he says, is proof that conservation measures are having an effect, and if it can work for mackerel, it can work for other species.

One of the main factors, he believes, in turning around the situation was the removal from the waters of eastern European vessels, which were taking spawning mackerel. He says he now believes the quota will be increased to 100,000 tonnes this year.

An increase in the pelagic fish quota would mean a lot to Donegal, in particular the 2,000-plus people who rely on fish processing for work.

"With the very stringent controls over the past three years, the factories may not be getting the product to keep them going at the levels of previous years. But with the evidence of stock recovery, I wouldn't be as pessimistic as the processors. If we get an increase in the quota this year, the factories should also see an upturn."

A member of the national review body drawing up proposals for the renegotiation of the EU Common Fisheries Policy, he wants to see tougher conservation measures but is sceptical that they will be accepted, given that "a lot of those voting are fishing in our back garden".

He believes that in the EU, politics often comes before conservation and he says Ireland has only three votes out of 87. "I feel the atmosphere is right, now, for these proposals to be put forward and then we will see who are the hypocrites regarding conservation."

He believes, however, that there is a greater willingness in the fishing industry throughout the EU now to take tougher measures to tackle the problem of declining stocks.

"Fishermen throughout the community have to be honest with themselves and accept there are going to be a few tough years ahead, but there is no gain without pain. There is no doubt fishermen are suffering pain at the moment, but I am more heartened now than I was two or three years ago."

Back in Killybegs, Murrin is pleased with the £20 million development of the harbour which has now started. This, along with the Whitefish Renewal Scheme, which will bring 30 new whitefish boats into the fleet, was one of the main reasons Murrin, who once ran in the European elections for Fine Gael, was able to praise Dr Woods on his departure.

The new whitefish boats will allow fishermen "to go further and wider to make a better living for themselves", and he says that it is "only because of technology and price levels" that many fishermen have managed to keep going in the current difficult times.

He dismisses any begrudgery or mention of "millionaires' row" in Killybegs, saying such success has been blown out of proportion. People "who went out and competed and invested" deserve their rewards.

"When we joined the EU we were supposed to die and go away, but we have shown we can compete with the Dutch and French - we had to fight for our industry. If we hadn't the boats, who would be catching that 70,000 tonnes of mackerel?"

If people elsewhere had taken the same approach, "there could be five Killybegs along the west coast", he says. While others are now suggesting that Killybegs' future lies in it being tied in with oil and gas exploration off the west coast, Murrin says he sees no reason why the port can't serve both functions. "They can both thrive side by side. I am confident we can all live together in harmony and that Killybegs in the future will be a vibrant port giving employment to the local community."

But for how much longer will he stay at the helm of the KFO? "I'll be around for a little while longer anyway, but I am not going to go on forever. I'd like to see how somebody else would do the job."

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Murrin looks back with pride on fight for fishermen

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A tough few years lie ahead for the fishing industry but there is now at least a glimmer of hope that the problem of declining fish stocks can be turned around, according to the new Donegal Person of the Year, Joey Murrin of the Killybegs Fishermen's Organisation.

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Betty Purcell analyses the development of the fishing industry and the current EEC fishing controversy

THE PROBLEMS of the Irish fishing industry run a lot deeper than the legal obstacles at present being encounntered by Irish fisheries representatives in Brussels. The problem of under-capitalisation and non-management of fish resources are historical ones Which pre-date our entry into the EEC. These issues must be dealt with - whatever the outcome of the present discussions on Ireland's claim for a national 50 mile fishing limit.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

While Ireland remained under Briitish rule, any development of the Irish fishing industry was viewed as a potential threat to Britain's industry. Petitions to Parliament from England ~nd Scotland resulted in a law being enacted during the 17th century which prevented Irish fishermen leaving port while the English fleet was fishing. In the 18th century, the curing of fish was brought to a standstill by the imposition of a penal duty on imported salt.

In this period, many Irish fishermen were forced to emigrate to Newfounddland. Irish crews were brought to the Orkneys and Shetlands because of their dexterity and expertise in fishing.

By 1800, fisheries, as an organised ind ustry, had ceased to exist in Ireland although the number of fishermen remained high. In 1830 there were 56,000 fishermen in Ireland and this figure soared as high as 113,000 in 1845, at the beginning of the famine. If the fishing industry had been developped rather than suppressed, there is little doubt that thousands of lives could have been saved during the famine by substituting sea protein for the blighted protein of the land. From 1850 onwards there was a sharp decline in the numbers involved in the industry sinking .to 23,000 in 1880. This figure remained constant up to the outbreak of World War I.

The aim of British policy was to weaken the competitive base of Irish fishing through decentralisation. 900 small harbours and jetties were built at dispersed points around the country. Some of these were only two to six yards long. Grants were given to small fishermen, although no grant was available to buy a boat more than 46 feet long. This had the effect of sub sid ising the poor so that they could fish on a small scale, yet curtailed the potential growth of a Sizable inndustry. Despite all this, the export of Irish fish continued to threaten the big powers. Irish fish exports were mentioned in the American House of Representatives as late as 1910.

The British fishing industry, on the other hand, flourished from the inflow of capital from the City of London. Six large ports were built up (including Hull, Grirnsby and Aberrdeen), and these provided a good infraastructure for the building of a strong, centralised British fishing industry. Along with the usual private channels of capital, the British industry beneefitted from capital grants made by' the railway companies to fish retailers. In Ireland, the industry relied almost totally on the weak local capital of the fishermen themselves.

This situation continued after inndependence and 'Ireland depends mainly on meat as a source of protein, largely because of its agricultural tradition. In i 922, the amount of fish consumed annually per head of population, was 10 lbs. In 1977 this figure had only risen to 12 lbs. per year. Thereefore, fish were not presented as a sound investment.

The attitude of successive Irish governments was to view the developpment of fishing as a social service in line with the industry's history in impoverished areas. This was the conntext in which BIM was established, and the provision of grants and loans to fishermen wishing to buy boats remains one of their central activities to this day. There was, however; a change in 1964 when a more commerrcial policy was inaugurated.

In the 'thirties, an attempt has been made to capitalise the industry, but this failed largely because of a slump in fish prices 'during that decade.

FISHING INDUSTRY TODAY

The 1962 White Paper restructured BIM as a development body, rather than as an industrial one. In the last seven years, cumulative investment in the fishing fleet has grown to £17 m, and £45m has been targeted for fleet exxpansion in the next four years. Shore investment has also risen from a mere £250,000 in 1967 to £4.5mn 1976. Inthis period, on-shore employment has risen from 450 to 1,600.

Since BIM took on its new role, fish catches have increased significantly as have fish exports (which makes up 83 per cent of the total fish caught). In 1963, fish exports were valued at £1.7m; in 1969 at £3.6m; and in 1976 they were worth £20m. Between 1967 and 1976, the contribution of fishing to the .Irish economy increased from £4Vzm to £16Y2m, and the total number of jobs in the industry rose from 6,300 to 11,500.

Despite all this, the fishing industry remains hopelessly underdeveloped. Only two Irish ships are 'over' 110ft long and 'the average size remains 75-80 ft. Out of a total of 2,462 fishing vessels operating in 1976, only 189 were in excess of 50 tons. The latest year for which comparable figures are available for other countries is 1973. Ireland had no boats over 50 tons in that year, while England and Wales had 348; Spain 1,310; France 494 and the Netherlands 184.

In the processing sector too, Ireland is very weak. In Killybegs, only minimal on-shore salting is done. The value added on £12.8m worth of fish (landed value) was only £10m, bringing the total export value up to £22m. This backwardness has a two ofold effect. On the one hand, the job ratio of fishermen to processors (and others employed in the industry) is very low by European standards - 10: 8 fishermen to on-shore workers. In other EEC countries, the ratio is up to 1:3 or 1:4, which affects our employment situation adversely. On the other hand, imports of processed fish continue to increase and now account for 30 per cent of the yalue of our fish exports. This in itself demonnstrates the superiority and 'sophistiication of processing industries such as Birds Eye and Findus, in other countries.

FISH STOCKS

The problem has been exacerbated by a world-wide depletion of fish stocks because of over-exploitation of the sea. The absoiute drop in the world fish catch from 74 million tons per annum to 70 million tons per annum between 1970 and the middle of the decade, does not seem too significant. But when we remember that investment increased considerably in this period, to be met by lower absolute returns, the problem appears more grave. In Ireland the depletion of fish stocks has been most noticeable in the case of herring.

In 1973-74 the Irish herring catch was 11,000 tons, while in 1975 - 76 it dropped to 6,500 tons. Both herring and mackerel are easily over caught because of their sociable nature. They travel in shoals which can be easily located and netted by modern trawlers. (Whitefish tend to survive better as they travel individually). Herring shoals do not plummet the depths as other fish and therefore are relatively easy to net. The overall number of fish caught dropped by 27.5 per cent between 1973 and 1975.

Fish stocks have traditionally connstituted a renewable resource'. But the introduction of increasingly complex fish-finding equipment (some of which can 'pinpoint a single fish at 600 ft.), of smaller meshes (including environnmentally hazardous 'purse seine")',' and of vacuum methods for extraction, give even the smallest fish poor chance of escape. The comfortable spawning beds of the ocean have been invaded, and the cycle of nature broken, by factory ships from the Soviet Union, Poland and East Germany. Where stocks are severely depleted, it will take a five-year ban on fishing in those waters to allow the status quo to be attained.

The legal background to the fisherries controversies dates from the time that coastal rights were defended by cannon. This effectively esta blished a three . mile coastal zone, which later became accepted as the legal terriitonal-waters.

The situation changed with the London Convention of 1964. This took place following a dispute between the. British and the Icelanders on terriitorial rights. The Icelanders were anxious to protect fish stocks in the waters around its country, mainly from British boats. The British wanted to protect its rights of entry to its traditional fishing waters, especially as cheap food policy was a corner stone 'of British politics.

The London Convention established a 12 mile limit, but with certain exxceptions. In the Irish case, these exceptions allowed the French, Dutch, Spanish and British (although it was little availed of by the latter) to fish up to six miles off the Irish coast.

A Common Fisheries Policy was not a central issue within the EEC among the original 'Six', as there were little unexhausted fishing waters at stake. However, when negotiations with the British, Irish, Danes and Norwegians got under way seriously in 1971 and 1972, the 'original 'Six', in anticipation of the inevitable diffiiculties arising from the accession of two island states and of anothertwo states also with valuable fishing waters, passed a special regulation - This states simply that "if a 'Common' Fisheries Policy was not agreed to by 1982, then there would be open access right up' to members' coast lines.

Meanwhile there were developments on a broader scale. Several countries throughout the world were pressing the United Nations to standardise the territorial limits and to this purpose the UN called a La w of the Sea Connference in 1975. Though this failed to reach any overall agreement, it did lead' to several countries, including Canada, the United States and Russia, declaring a 200 mile limit.

In response to these developments, the. 'Nine' agreed in June 1976 to follow suit, and to each declare a 200 mile limit, effective from January 1 st, 19n. From that there followed negootiations with non-EEC countries on reciprocal rights of access to territorial waters. Ireland's right of veto over any 'third party' agreements is one of its primary 'levels' in the current negotiating on a joint fisheries policy.

In early 1976, the EEC Commission began to formulate a Common Fishheries Policy, which was first debated by the Council of Ministers at its meeting in The Hague in October, 1976.

One of the agreements at the Hague meeting was that member countries would have the right to take unilateral action to protect fish stocks, so long as these measures did not discriminate against other member states. But all the Commission proposals to date have involved fishing rights to all member countries in waters up to 6 miles from the coast, coupled with selective conservation measures.

The demand for a 50 mile limit has been consisstently put forward by all of the Irish interests conncerned: the Irish Fishermen's organisation, the I.T.G.W.U., Fianna Fail and Fine Gael. The 50 mile zone corresponds roughly to the continental shelf off Ireland. It is boundded on the north by 46.30 degrees north latitude, on the west by 12 degrees west longitude, on the south by 50.30 degrees north latitude and on the east by a median line which divides Ireland from Britain.

This continental shelf is most immportant for Ireland because it is here that most species of fish live and breed, and because Ireland has no deep sea fishing fleet. The IFO claim that only control by our national government can ensure the conservation and manageement of the industry.

The unilateral declaration by the Coalition government of a 50 - mile limit on all boats over 110ft. or 1,100 horse power last April was judged to 'appear discriminatory' by the European Court. An injunction orderring the suspension of the action was granted to the EEC Commission and this ruling has been backed by the Advocate General of the Court in his recent summing up of the case.

In our bid to derive concessions from the EEC Ministers, the main arguuments Ireland has used have been:

1. The importance of developing the industry in a relatively underveloped country such as ours. The need to harmonise the EEC economies has already been recognised and this is at the base of the Regional policy. Fishing contributes more, in percentage terms, to Irish Gross Domestic Prooduct, than it does in any other EEC state apart from Denmark (when Greenland is included). Even in commparison with Britain, it is twice as immportant relatively as the British fishing industry is.

2. Our special position as one of the main contributors of fishing waters to our partner states, many of whose waters are now closed from access. Charlie Haughey made this point forcefully in the Dail, when he said: 'Why should Irish fisheries, this one natural resource that our under-developed economy has at its disposal to develop, be thrown into a Communnity pool for the benefit of all the memmber states of the Community when German steel, British oil, Dutch gas, none of these are thrown into a community pool?'

These arguments have been reecognised as valid by the EEC Commisssion, but there is a stubborn refusal to concede coastal control. Quotas and licences are the suggested alterrnative. The IFO argue that quotas are 'unenforceable', and they point to the North Sea where quotas failed to work, leading eventually to a total ban on herring fishing in that area. They also argue that the Commission, succum bing to political pressure, has created 'paper fish' bringing quota figures above the scientifically agreed optimum. Although the quotas to Ireeland are generous (we are the only country which is being allowed to catch more fish than previously), the IFO argue that the fish are not there to back them. Licensing would be effective only if fish caught by foreign ships had to be landed in Irish ports. This would make surveillance easier and less costly, they say, since onnshore patrols could be emphasised.

FIANNA FAIL'S RECORD

Fianna Fail, while in opposition, relentlessly urged re-negotiation of the Treaty of Access, to allow the deeclaration of a 50 mile limit. Mr Dennis Gallagher (who was Fianna Fail's fisheries spokesman at the time) put it simply: 'We will continue to fight on this side of the House for a 50 mile coastal band. We cannot move one inch from that position. There is no other way we can expand and develop the industry.'

Michael O'Kennedy committed Fianna Fail to a deefinite line of action: 'When we come into government, we will seek to do as we have a right to do under the Treaty of Accession, under the rights we have as a coastal state to renegootiate the terms of the Treaty, having regard to the proovisions of Articles 103, so that the new regime. for our fishing industry and all the community will take account of the contribution we have made to that community since we signed in 1970, namely the contribution of 200 miles. Fianna Fail will renegotiate on that position.'

Mr Haughey put it more dramatically: 'If we hand over our coastal seas to the Commission, we can forget about the development of an Irish fishing industry. That is the naked brutal truth of the matter.' By introducing the Opposition 'Mariitime Jurisdiction Bill' in December 1976, Fianna Fail made their resolute attitude to the question of the 500mile limit an issue in last year's Geeneral Election.

While the European Court ponntificated on the Coalition's unilateral 500mile declaration, Fianna Fail, on entering government, denounced it as 'blatantly discriminatory'. In October 1977 Brian Lenihan (the new Governnment's Fisheries Minister) began using the term 'special zone' instead of 'exclusive zone', and raised the shackles of the IFO by using the phrase 'a limit of up to 50 miles' repeatedly. The current round of negotiations seems to lead towards a backing-down on Ireland's basic demand in favour of a Commission-proposed compromise.

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Fishing controversy: A Case History of Imperialism

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Betty Purcell analyses the development of the fishing industry and the current EEC fishing controversy THE PROBLEMS of the Irish fishing industry run a lot deeper than the legal obstacles at present being encounntered by Irish fisheries representatives in Brussels. The problem of under-capitalisation and non-management of fish resources are historical ones Which pre-date our entry into the EEC.

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Fishing for a Future: The Reform of the Common Fisheries Policy

by Killian Kehoe

Free to Download

This paper outlines the history of the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) from an Irish perspective, before identifying the perceived failures of the current policy and proposing nine options for reform. These options seek to set out realistic and practical steps to secure the future of the Irish and European fishing industry.

This paper is published in the context of a broad-based consultation by the European Commission with Member States and stakeholders, with a view to bringing about fundamental reform of the CFP. This offers a timely opportunity to address the cycle of decline in which the Irish and European fisheries industry has been trapped in recent decades.

It is against this background that the IIEA has submitted this paper to the Irish and European consultation process. The paper, which was compiled by Killian Kehoe and informed by dialogue with industry stakeholders, is being circulated to key policy-makers and thought-leaders in the sector with a view to stimulating further debate and encouraging vital changes to the CFP. This follows a successful panel discussion on 8th October 2009 at the institute on 'the Reform of the CFP' with Dr. Reinhard Priebe of the European Commission, and Lorcán Ó'Cinnéide, Chief Executive of the Irish Fish Producers' Organisation (link).

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Fishing for a Future: The Reform of the Common Fisheries Policy | IIEA

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This paper outlines the history of the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) from an Irish perspective, before identifying the perceived failures of the current policy and proposing nine options for reform.