Editorial comment
Cormac Burke, IFSA
One can’t but help notice the public uproar this week with the exposure of the fact that the Government forked out €335,000 of Irish taxpayers’ money for a new ‘bike shed’ at Leinster House which, at 14 bike sections, equates to €23,928.57 per space.
Thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of Irish citizens have taken to social media this week, some to voice their anger and others to ridicule the system of government that regularly sees such fiascos - - the last major one being in 2019 when they paid €808,000 for a huge printer, only to then discover that it wouldn’t fit in the door - - leading to an additional €230,000 being spent in storage of the unit until structural alterations were carried out to get it installed and, it is rumoured, the system never really worked anyway…
But, although a financially smaller red herring than the printer, the bike ‘shed’ saga has suddenly seen politicians attacking each other like rats in a barrel - queuing up to point fingers and lay blame on the other party - - seemingly with the Office of Public Works (OPW) coming out as the fall guy in this scenario.
And of course, all parties are calling for enquiries and investigations into how this came about and who exactly authorised and signed off on it.
However, what those of us in the Irish fishing industry find hard to understand is the widespread uproar at the Government blowing €335,000 on this white elephant but then there’s not a word of public complaint when this same Government oversees a long term strategy of dismantling the Irish fishing industry and giving increasing access to the wealthy fish resource in Irish waters to foreign vessels who are taking possibly up to 100 times more than what was wasted on the bike shed, and taking that amount out of Irish waters EVERY YEAR.
It might sound like that’s a far fetched amount of money being removed from Irish waters but one must realise that 85% of all fish quota in Irish waters has been given to non Irish vessels while the Irish fleet is starved of quota, and the EU has done deals to allow Norway (and possibly soon to include Iceland) to take vast amounts Irish fish from Irish waters, and then factor in the Dutch factory ships constantly working off the west coast of Ireland for the past countless number of years and taking unknown quantities of Irish fish as they are not monitored by the Irish authorities nor are they inspected to any serious level when they return home to land their processed catch.
So where is the outcry from the Irish public? And why are our politicians not showing the same level of rage over the giving away of a resource worth hundreds of millions of euros every year as they are over the wasting of a few hundred thousand euros on a bike shed - - a resource by the way which belongs to the citizens of this nation and not to this Government nor to the EU, and yet these same politicians who claim to ‘care’ so much do not even challenge PR ‘spin’ reports from bodies such as DAFM, BIM or the SFPA and the Marine Minister when they manipulate the figures and attempt to show that this industry is ‘doing fine’ and basically send out the message of “Crisis? What crisis?”
And, for anyone who raises concerns or tries to tell the truth regarding the false messages being portrayed by these reports, they are castigated as “being negative” by these semi state bodies who are supposed to be representing the best interests and further development of the Irish fishing industry - -
- somewhere down through the years the line has become blurred and these bodies seem to have forgotten that they are supposed to be working FOR the people in the fishing industry and that its not the other way around.
Anyway, back to the point - - as an election looms in the coming months I know that every political canvasser that comes to my door will be asked why they felt they had to go on tv, radio and social media to voice outrage at a bike shed at Leinster House but generally remained quiet for years while thousands of people in Irish coastal communities, those on boats, in fish factories, in associated industry companies, are all facing major income and revenue reductions for a fourth year in a row while the fishing industries everywhere outside of Ireland are enjoying a boom time in Irish waters.
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