BIM ‘vision’ - The emperor has no clothes
- ifsacormac
- 12 minutes ago
- 3 min read
The phrase “putting lipstick on a pig doesn’t alter the fact that it’s still a pig” was never more apt as when one reads the latest BIM advertisement looking for a new Chief Executive Officer (CEO).
Bord Iascaigh Mara, the organisation that was once upon a time the most important body in the fishing industry / catching sector, but who now goes out of its way to never use the term ‘fishing industry’ but prefers the sexier and more PC sounding ‘seafood sector’.
So, gone from the days of the 1970s and 80’s when this body was populated with people with first hand experience and understanding of how the catching sector worked to now working largely with spin doctors and media degrees to produce a ‘strategy’ of working with the importation of seafood from outside of Ireland, repackaging it and selling to the public as ‘Irish’ seafood… and this of course assists in the production of annual reports claiming how wonderful everything is because ‘Irish’ seafood has grown by x % that year… but hiding the fact that the Irish fishing industry…the genuine catching sector from inshore, demersal and pelagic to the many processors that rely on this sector to survive, are ALL going down the pan.
Indeed the annual reports on the state of the fishing industry produced by BIM under the oversight of the worst fisheries minister in the history of the State, Charlie McConalogue, were so incorrect and wide of the facts that once highly respected BIM damaged their own reputation and made them irrelevant in the Irish fishing industry as a whole.
And what are BIM now doing during this current terminal illness of the traditional rural coastal communities?
When they are not busy trying to convince the general public how well Ireland’s ‘seafood industry’ is doing then they are sometimes dealing with DAFM-designed ‘schemes’ which, on the face of it, are advertised as supposedly to help fishing vessel owners but once you get into the small print, are actually designed to make application for the user complicated and most unattractive (one major example being the advertisement of a 50% grant aid scheme for new engines for demersal vessels to provide less emissions but once the applicant is authorised and proceeds with the project and then tries to claim back the grant he discovers that the engine has been ‘re-classified’ and broken down into many different parts… and most of these part excluded from grant aid …. In other words yes you can qualify for the grant but then (in small print) this won’t include gearbox, PTO, manifold, etc etc.
And so, the new approx €160,000 p.a. CEO can look forward to BIM’s ‘vision’ that the claim they will
“partner with the Irish seafood sector in every possible way, with intent and urgency, to identify and drive the changes needed to ensure its sustainable future”.
The fact that 90% of Irish fishermen could not even name the last four CEOs of BIM, and won’t recognise the name of the next appointment, says everything you need to know about the modern day relevance of this body in the overall Irish fishing industry.
Perhaps they’ll surprise everyone and hire a fresh face of someone who is not a ‘yes man’ and someone with at least a basic understanding of the catching sector.
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