Pádraig Mac Lochlainn (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I will meet with representatives of the fishing industry in the North of Ireland later today and I know they are concerned that this agreement has pitted fishers on the island against each other.

They want to unite across the island with one voice looking for a fair share of the fishing resource all around our island. They do not want to be divided by this agreement. They want to unite. I will feed back to the Minister what they are saying and I urge the Department to engage with the fishing organisations in the North to hear what they have to say. It might be surprised that they have a very different view from the fishers across the water.

The framework of the Common Fisheries Policy has been relative stability, which is based on fishing practices in the 1970s and 1980s. This framework of relative stability has been fundamentally undermined by this trade deal in which the British Government put zonal attachment, whereby the fish would benefit the fishing communities closest to the waters. I argue that the Minister needs to advance this proposition and that Ireland needs to argue for similar treatment.

While we say the British were looking for their waters, we have to be realistic, and I say this in the context of Ireland and Britain. We are exporting into a market of 500 million people in the European Union. Therefore, everybody accepts there has to be compromise in accessing the waters. The problem for Ireland is we have given away far too much of our share of the fish in our waters. We have to rebalance this. This is an opportunity to rebalance the injustice not only of this deal but of deals of the past. This is why we tabled an amendment to the Minister's motion in recent days. We need to unite across all political parties on this island. Every political party on this island needs to unite and demand that our fishers get a fair share, not an unreasonable share, of the fish in our waters. I ask the Minister to join and unite across the political divide on this objective.

I ask that this allocation of €113 million for our fishing community arising from Brexit be increased substantially and that the fishing industry that Deputy Pringle spoke about, the fishers themselves and the people who work in the factories, be involved in how that money is allocated to our communities. It is so important that the money goes to all of the people impacted by this.