Mr. Patrick Murphy:

To respond to Deputy McConalogue on the voisinageagreement, the easiest way to put this in context is to look to the people behind the Deputy in the Public Gallery who brought this case to the High Court. I myself am involved in the aquaculture business, in mussels, but we do not dredge our seed, we collect them naturally with spat collectors. If we collect the seed outside in the bay, we can bring it back in to another part of the bay where it is licensed and one can continue to grow the seed. We pay for the rights of that area of water whereas with the wild seed, it is on the bottom and people can go in and dredge it. They then take that seed into an inner bay and relay it and when it gets bigger, to marketable size, they come back and harvest it. What was happening was that foreign boats, under a foreign flag, were coming in and taking the seed. The amounts they took were deemed to be enough so that when the Irish vessels came in, there was no seed for them. It basically put them out of business. In reciprocal rights, this seed was then taken to another jurisdiction and was put down in an area of the sea bed, but suddenly it was no longer reciprocal so the Irish boats could not go back up at a later date when the seed was big enough and, like their counterparts, take the seed, harvest it and take it to market. I hope that explains the context of how this started.

If we fast forward to today, huge changes are coming down the line due to Brexit, and the UK wants to pull out of the London convention of 1994 where all these agreements were made because it wants to take back ownership of its fishing water and the UK will take control of the access. The UK has also flagged that it will increase the amount of fish that it will catch in its own waters. That will change the balance of fish caught across the European Union. At the moment, UK vessels catch 548,000 tonnes per annum, of which 350,000 is caught within its own waters and around 200,000 is caught outside its waters, whereas Ireland catches only 200,000 tonnes, of which nearly 50% is caught in UK waters. I was given one estimate that 70% of the fish caught by UK vessels outside of its own waters are caught in Irish waters, so that would be around 140,000 tonnes versus our 100,000 tonnes. If we had a reciprocal arrangements on that quota, not having to deal through the EU, we would have no problem. Unfortunately that is not the case. We do not negotiate, Europe negotiates on our behalf. After Brexit and after the London convention has been torn up and scrapped, when these boats would be allowed to come in to the zero to six mile zone, the UK would not be obliged to pay it back for any fish they catch as it is no longer the European quota. Who pays it back then? Does Ireland have to take that off its own allocation from the December Council?

It has been pointed out earlier, we do not fish in the UK waters so they have a huge advantage coming down. We should be cognisant of the vessels that have been operating around the shoreline, and I have sympathy for these vessels. They are caught in a situation that was deemed legal by the Department until very recently when it was found that there was no legal basis for this arrangement. We asked another question of the Department, namely when we bring in this legislation, we assume that there has not been the same implementation of legislation to allow us to go back up there, that their arrangement was never legal either. We asked how we will decide which vessels will be allowed access into our waters and we were told that it would be decided on the size of the vessels that we ourselves deemed would be allowed to fish within our waters. That is the way that we would control the foreign boats coming in. For instance, if we said that only 15 m boats and under would fish in the six mile zone, then that would then apply to Northern Ireland. To turn that on its head, we do not know what size they will set for their shoreline. They could decide it was 5 m for their vessels and then only 5 m vessels and under for Irish vessels could go back up there. This arrangement needs to be discussed. As evident from the discussion here today, no one consulted with the industry to highlight these issues. The Deputy is asking why no one in the Department asked us. That is something that he will have to ask them. We would have considerable reservations ourselves about why that has not happened. It was not the case that the topic was not raised. It has been raised several times.

On the mackerel, the Deputy asked what it would mean for boats that had invested. I thought that question might come up so I brought some pictures.

I brought some pictures not of RSW vessels but of polyvalent vessels in the pelagic sector. It is hard to tell them apart. The same investment made by the RSW fleet has also been made by these vessels. RSW is a means of improving the quality of fish; it is not a means of catching them. I spoke to a fish buyer who used to bring mackerel to the Russian ships off the south-west coast about the history of who built up the quotas. Everybody built them up. Later, it was discovered that larger vessels had to compete with the international fleet and, therefore, had to invest. When at that stage, there was nobody else to come in, the RSW vessels knew that if they were to compete, even with only 13% of the fishery versus 87%, they would have to take that risk. They decommissioned two or three boats for themselves. The diagram outlines the earnings for ten years by the two fleet segments. A total of €670 million was earned over the past ten years by the RSW segment versus €97 million by the mackerel fishery. That is a ratio of 7:1. We were asked about the differences in the 27 vessels and why there is disagreement among them. One would have to investigate who owns the 27 vessels. Are any of the 27 owned by the owners of the 23? Do they own both vessels?

I have 16 signed declarations and two submissions in our office that state if they get enough fish, they will give up their entitlements. Mr. Boyle set the figure at 350 tonnes, which means that 20 by 350 is 7,000 tonnes. The increase is 14,000 tonnes and the members can do the maths to see if it is possible. We did not want to set out what should be done; we only wanted this to be investigated. Senator Mac Lochlainn mentioned the Department. We visited the Department on 4 October with our colleagues. We presented officials with a proposal. We did not give facts and figures but we requested that this be investigated to see if it is possible. That is all we asked for. When we did not secure the investigation we sought, we had to conduct the investigation ourselves and these are the figures that resulted. With regard to the blue whiting species, there is 9% for the polyvalent sector and 91% for the 23. In that section this year, only ten polyvalent vessels can fish whereas they can all fish for blue whiting. There is a difference in the sharing of the mackerel within the RSW sector with different ratios applying. Some boats get double others and they manage to operate on a year-to-year basis. There is more to this tale than what has been outlined at this hearing but it is not for me to pick one section of our fishing industry and pit it against the other. That was never the intention. It was about stopping our white fish fleet between 12 m and 24 m being decimated again. We put forward these proposals to our colleagues in the industry. I explained the figures to them and, thankfully, the NIFF looked at it. It has its own way of looking at it and perhaps the fish should be distributed in a fairer way, but account has to be taken of which vessels can access the fishery as well.