Dr. Cecil Beamish:

In the first instance, it will have to be done on the basis that stocks must reach maximum sustainable yield. A proposal will come from the Commission and will be decided on by the Council. The Common Fisheries Policy text is giving guidance to the Commission on how it makes the proposal. When we are bringing in the discard ban, we cannot simply propose a quota as if nothing has changed. The quota must take account of the fact that from 2016 or 2018 - the date that applies to the stock in question - the previous discards of a stock will have to be landed. In the case of each of these stocks, a higher quota will have to be put in place to reflect the discarding of that stock which will no longer take place. That is the principle. The Council cannot determine that in advance - it can simply set out the principle. The Commission makes the proposal to the Council on the quota. This is one of the principles that the Commission will have to take into account in proposing a quota. It will also have to consider where the stock is and the direction in which the stock is going, etc. This will be taken into account when the discard ban is introduced. I am referring to the Council's proposal. The Parliament has not done anything like that. The Parliament proposal does not reflect the idea that the quota will have to be changed to take account of the fact that the sizeable discards we saw in the past will no longer take place and will have to be landed. This is another example of something the Council has worked through in greater detail. It has in place a greater range of flanking measures around the decision to introduce a gradual discard ban. All of that will have to be worked through during the discussion.

I did not come back to the Deputy on the question of regionalisation, which he raised earlier. Everybody agrees that a "one size fits all" Common Fisheries Policy is not desirable because it would not work from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea and the western waters. It gets complicated after that. In most of the fisheries around Ireland that matter, at least two or three big member states are fishing alongside the Irish fishing fleet. It is desirable to be able to make targeted regional decisions on measures to manage stocks in particular sea basins and areas. The question of how this can be done has been the subject of a fairly detailed debate at Council level over a couple of years. One of the principles of the debate is that there must be fairness in the decision-making process. It is easy to envisage how two or three bigger member states might form a gang and do something that a smaller member state might not like and might wish to vote down or overrule. The fisheries sector is a very competitive environment.

There has been a debate on this at Council level. The outcome, as set out in the text that was agreed in February, is that when unanimous agreement on a set of measures is reached by all the member states involved in the fishery in a particular area, the Commission will fast-track those measures into European law. That was seen as important by Ireland because if there is to be fairness in the system, all fishermen fishing the same species side-by-side under European flags should be subject to the same EU rules. The relevant coastal member state - Ireland in the case of Irish waters - should be able to apply those EU laws to all the vessels fishing in its area. That is the version of regionalisation that the Council has supported. If unanimous agreement is not reached, the Commission will have to make a proposal in the normal way. Like any other proposal, it will have to go through the co-decision process. Unanimity among the member states involved will be required if a proposal is to be fast-tracked. That is the Council version.

The proposal made by the Parliament is different. Essentially, it has suggested that each member state should make the rules for its own fleet and that an attempt should be made to co-ordinate between the member states. In the view of the Council and the Irish Government, that is a problematic way of going about shared fisheries. At a minimum, it would lead to a perception that fishermen under different flags in the same fishery are operating under different rules. If that happens, very negative things will happen in the fishery and in terms of perceptions. There is quite a difference between the approaches to regionalisation of the Council and the Parliament. Member states that tend to speak about the repatriation of powers tend to prefer the Parliament's approach as it would allow them to make the rules under national law. Almost all of Ireland's fisheries are heavily shared fisheries. Large fleets from other countries are fishing alongside our own fishermen. That is why the Irish Government has been supporting the approach that the Council included in the February agreement. Everybody wants regionalisation, but how will it work in practice? How can it be fair to the fishermen on the ground? That is the debate. If something like the Council version of the text is adopted, significant progress will have been made because it will speed up the process of arriving at more tailored solutions for fisheries in particular areas.

That would obviously be a good development.

On the debate about who has access to what waters, etc., this was one of the first items of the reform process on which there was no desire for change. From the outset, member states did not seek to change the six and 12 mile arrangements that have been in place since 1964, long before the Common Fisheries Policy was introduced. The limits were viewed as elements that were settled, as it were, even before the Commission made a proposal. The Commission did not make a proposal to change the six and 12 mile limits in the Green Paper. However, it should be noted that fishermen are not treated differently in terms of their access to a stock, whether inside or outside a zone. The stock is divided out on a relative stability basis and the member states then decide which fishermen receive what share of the national quota.