Mr. Dermot Conway:

There was one prosecution of a fisherman in this State and he was found not guilty. It is very important to remember that.

I would make a couple of comments about the Marine Survey Office logbooks. Senator Gavan said there was a widespread failure to recognise a problem within the industry. The Marine Survey Office logbooks have to do with crew composition and trips. They have nothing to do with non-EEA fishermen authorisation within the State. In fact, and I am sure the WRC will confirm this, we - by that I mean almost everyone on this side of the room - have attended at least two meetings with the WRC to discuss issues about certain documents the WRC was requesting. Number one on the list was the MSO book because the MSO book contains information about share fishermen as well as the non-EEA fishermen.

The owner-operators were warned there were data protection control issues over giving information which the WRC was not entitled to, and the WRC very correctly pointed out that it needed to make sure what the crew composition was on a boat, and that if somebody was a non-EEA national that it would be able to identify that person and be able to ascertain whether or not that person was legally working within the State. Two meetings were held about that, because it was a compromise. From my perspective, the Marine Survey Office, MSO, logbook is not the issue to be concerned about here. The issue to be concerned about is whether or not there is enough uptake of non-EEA visas. The second issue is whether or not there is a cohort of owners who are not complying with the legislation, and the third issue whether or not the representations made by the two organisations the Senator referred to are fair and accurate. We say that of course the observations being made are not fair. The question then becomes whether or not they are accurate. As someone who acts for the fishing industry and for the owners and representative bodies I do not pretend that there is not a single owner out there who is not capable of happily breaching the law. What I am saying is that I can give evidence that 134 visas were applied for through my office alone. One does not need to do the maths to wonder, given the fact that if I did 134 visa applications and there are only 500 available, where the other non-EEA fishermen who are being dealt with by the system in some shape, fashion or form are. By that I mean that the owner being prosecuted for having someone illegally working on their place of work or the INIS dealing with the person who is unlawfully in the jurisdiction.

There are other issues, such as what roles the Naval Service, the MSO and the WRC are playing. Are all these organisations simply not processing the evidence the Senator says exists that says that we, as an industry, are in denial? The answer is that I do not think that the numbers stack up with the actions of the organs of the State. The Naval Service has not prosecuted anybody for it. The WRC has five had prosecutions, not 70. The INIS is not dealing with any owner that I am aware of. I act for a substantial number of them, and the representative bodies here would of course have contact with them. The question begging to be asked is, does the evidence of the Migrants Rights Commission and that of the ITF stack up with the actions of the State?