Thomas Pringle (Donegal South West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Let us take a hypothetical example of a vessel owner who has all the technical gear, the conservation escape hatches, has a biannual quota allowance and carries out all the de minimisrules to the letter of the law but must land fish because of being over quota, will he or she be prosecuted?

That should not happen. We must not forget that fishermen go out week after week and catch quota that gradually gets wound down. They get allocated all the time. It is not as if they catch all of their quota in the last week of the year. They will know how they are going. Most will be experienced in terms of the expectations around catch, given where they are fishing and so on. This should be managed and planned so that people can catch their full quota and any excess is predictable. We should be able to deal with much of the excess through the inter-species and inter-annual transfer arrangements. After that point, there is flexibility in respect of de minimis.

I am not in the business of trying to catch people out. We are trying to be proactive in introducing a new system that can work for everyone. If someone is deliberately breaching or trying to take advantage of the rules, we have an obligation to enforce them. The point of having regional decision making on how to implement the obligation to land for next year was to devise a practical and workable plan. The industry was involved in that plan. This is not a case of politicians and policy makers deciding how the fishing industry will do something. There has been a great deal of stakeholder involvement in the regional decision-making process.