Verona Murphy (Wexford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

With due respect to the Minister, it is the competent authority but this is something that relates to Ireland. This report did not go back to the SFPA, it came back to the Irish Government. Is it fair to say that it is actually up to the Minister to fund the SFPA and to put the control mechanism in place? The SFPA is already in receipt of millions of euros. In the past two years it has received, I believe, in excess of €24 million, and it has brought no actual prosecutions and has put us in jeopardy, as the Minister has said of €38 million, and it may be a little bit more. There is no prosecution and it has no mechanism for weighing fish. Anything to do with the weighing of fish in the method that it is proposing is a food safety hazard, apart from anything else, and it is putting at risk all of the produce that is caught and has to be weighed on the quayside in the sun, where ice is dumped. Most of the quayside’s do not even have the ability to even provide ice. Yet, this is what we are moving forward with, with funding of millions of euros coming to the SFPA. The Minister is absolving himself of any responsibility to provide weighing mechanisms.

The Road Safety Authority, RSA, does not ask hauliers to weigh their trucks. It is the enforcement agency and it must provide the weighing machines that are installed on the side of the roads. If it has weigh pads, these are brought out with the authority and are calibrated every time they are moved. Every time a movable weighing mechanism is moved, it must be calibrated, because the act of movement in itself uncalibrates it and it has to be calibrated every time it lands. We have small piers in Wexford, in Duncannon, Kilmore Quay and Ballyhack. None of these piers, and Kilmore Quay is the biggest of these, has a weighing mechanism for outside. There is no way that this is going to be enforced in the same way upon foreign vessels as it will be on Irish fishing vessels. That is already the case here.

There were 153 inspections carried out from information I received from a parliamentary question that I asked a number of weeks ago. In the six-week period from mid-February to the end of March 2021, the SFPA carried out 153 inspections. I would say that that is quite sizeable given that our fishing boats only come back to pier once a week and there were no serious infringements. Yet, we have the EU telling us that we are not capable. These were inspections carried out, by the way, before we saw the headline in the press that we were not capable of administering a control mechanism. What does the Minister have to say to that?