As an Irish citizen you cannot watch this program about the end of the Irish fishing industry without feeling genuine sadness and sickness that eventually turns to anger.
While our national broadcaster RTÉ churns out press releases to fool the Irish public that all is well in the Irish seafood industry, and Ireland’s inept Marine Minister Charlie McConalogue keeps telling people what a good job he’s doing, it takes a French/German tv station to come out with the truth, the reality that Irish fishermen are being persecuted and driven off their own waters.
As depicted in the program, these are real people, honest and hardworking people with a lifetime’s work in fishing, people with families, people who had hoped that their children would be able to follow their fathers to sea as they themselves, and generations before them, had done.
Every TD currently in Dáil Éireann, and every candidate running in the next election, should be forced to watch this program and then be asked what they intend to do about it.
And those who pay their license fee to RTÉ should be demanding why our national broadcaster is not telling the Irish public the truth instead of just being a PR machine and a mouthpiece a Government that continues to bow and scrape to the EU Commission which has clearly been infiltrated by powers from other EU Member States while Irish fishermen are being put out of work while other nations reap the bonanza of Ireland’s rich waters.