Mr. Francis O'Donnell:

I have never been afraid to put it in writing and to try to tease out the very serious issues here. Many of my vessels in their very early stages would have had non-EEA workers on board. I would not say it was an open secret but it was known that people were working in the country in 2006 in the fishing industry who were here illegally. We are on record in 2008 for writing to Fianna Fáil at the time asking for this to be looked at and addressed. We have done that on numerous occasions since. We could not say that it was not happening prior to 2006 and I cannot honestly say that it is still not happening now, but we are trying to do something about it. That is where we are. Nobody has responded to us. No one Minister is responsible.

I welcome what has happened here today because it has teased out some of the issues. I think we have to be fair. It is not that we are coming in and saying that we are angels. We are not saying that at all, but the arms of the State that are charged with policing and managing this have to be given due process and a fair crack at dealing with the problems. I said it myself on record. This is not about the industry and the International Transport Workers' Federation, ITF, or anybody else. I am more than willing to go with Ken Fleming or anybody else into any Garda station in this country and hand over any information or files because this is extremely damaging to us. Somebody, at some point, has to present the information, give it to the authorities and let justice take its course. The committee will not hear me saying that this should not happen or is wrong.

I remember one of the first raids that happened in Howth and Castletownbere. Everybody here knows about it. I was quite critical of the Garda approach at that time. They came on board fishing vessels with automatic weapons, sidearms and Alsatians. They inspected the vessels to see where employers were breaching the atypical working scheme or, even worse, if they had people on board who did not have visas. I felt it was very heavy-handed. I made a complaint to GSOC at the time because I felt there were other ways of doing this. Uniformed members of An Garda Síochána could have come down onto fishing vessels and carried out the inspections. I felt that it did not need that level of force. The job could have been done just as well. We were on the back foot again because this made international news: Alsatians and automatic weapons made the industry look very bad. In hindsight, I look back at it and think that it was not a bad thing. We had a very serious problem with all of these undocumented people. Nobody knew that this was happening. My phone started ringing that morning. I do not believe anybody was tipped off about this whatsoever. It was as much of a shock for us as it was for everybody else.

If there were thousands of migrant workers in Ireland who were undocumented, surely at two of our major fishing ports, Castletownbere and Howth - Howth probably is not that big - this would start to surface and would have surfaced since. There may be some problems and there may be rogue operators, but at the moment we find ourselves here in front of the committee because there has really been no mechanism to address the issues if they are there. Nobody is taking responsibility and we have asked. We have not been sitting idle on this because we know it is very damaging. We are frustrated because we are not in a position actually to see the evidence and get to the bottom of it.