OPEN LETTER - - IFSA

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This farce must stop!

An Open Letter to Minister Timmy Dooley and to the members of the Oireachtas Committee on Fisheries & Maritime Affairs

Dear Editor,

Many of your readers will by now be aware of the recent Oireachtas Fisheries Committee meeting (July 1st) which looked at the ‘Review of the Sea Fisheries and Maritime Jurisdiction Act 2006 (Examination of Sea Fisheries Protection)’ and which, in general, gave the invited industry guests the opportunity to raise many points for the benefit of the Committee members regarding the SFPA and its apparent abuse of the monitoring & control system compared to the rules employed elsewhere in the EU.

Many good points were highlighted by the four industry representatives present in the room and the one other joining the meeting online as he was out of the country and the Committee certainly took on board what they were hearing and indeed they were perplexed and irritated with some of the information showing that Irish fishermen are being hit with a vast range of criminal penalties for infringements that, in other EU nations, are generally considered ‘minor offences’.

However, for me the two points that most held up the Irish system as illogical and unworkable were:

(a) when Patrick Murphy (IS&WFPO) explained that when a demersal vessel in a mixed fishery reaches a quota limit of a secondary or by-catch species then under the discard ban rule he isn’t allowed dump any excess of this species and must return ashore to land his catch - - but on doing so he is hit by the SFPA for landing that excess of by-catch for which his quota was filled.

This, as Mr Murphy rightly described it, is ‘double jeopardy’ and the master of the vessel is dammed if he dumps fish at sea and he’s dammed if he comes ashore to land it….

(b) Brendan Byrne (IFPEA) once again explained the fiasco where Irish processors have, at great expense, been forced by the SFPA to install vast banks of CCTV systems so that the SFPA can monitor 24/7 and yet, when a pelagic vessel is landing down at the local pier, the SFPA refuse to accept the irrefutable factory data and instead insist on an incredibly random system of taking sample baskets of fish as they come off the vessel and they determine the composition of the catch based on this…

To prove the futility of this system, one pelagic skipper has informed the IFSA that last season he, following the SFPA demands, had to ‘guesstimate’ the amount of by-catch out of several hundred tonnes of main catch - - he did this and from his 15 years of experience at sea he put the by-catch at around 3 tonnes.

But when the SFPA did their random sampling at the pier - at times when large volumes of the by-catch were coming through, they came up with an estimate of 19 tonnes of by-catch…. And charged the skipper with underestimating the by-catch - a charge for which the skipper will face Court, possible penalty points, and maybe even a criminal conviction.

But, this is where it gets interesting…. The actual and irrefutable factory figures for this boat’s landing of fish resulted in a by-catch of…… yes, exactly 3 tonnes…

Now, what needs to be understood here is that this insistence of forcing skippers to guess the volume of their catches exists purely so that they can be beaten with a rod of their own making - - the SFPA, who refuse to use the factory data when dealing with a pelagic vessel or its skipper, later DO USE the factory data when returning official figures to the EU Commission…

…. Therefore, whether a skipper is close or miles out in his guess it makes absolutely zero difference or bearing to the quota management or stock conservation as the final and official figures submitted to the EU are based on factory data.

So clearly, the entire ‘guesstimate’ rule by the SFPA is in place as a tool to criminalise fishermen without actually showing the EU that the figures from SFPA themselves are wildly out of line with the actual resulting figures coming out of the factories.

This, and the many other points raised by the industry at the recent Committee meeting, show why Minister Dooley and the Oireachtas Fisheries Committee must urgently suspend the SFPA activities and place the monitoring & control in the hands of the Food Safety Authority until a new fisheries body is established.

Minister, and Oireachtas Committee Members - - when trying to understand how the Irish fishing industry has reached its current dismal state of crisis under the management of the DAFM civil servants and the SFPA quango, I suggest you recall the words of Lord Acton who said “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely”….

Cormac Burke,

Chairman, Irish Fishing & Seafood Alliance (IFSA)