Mr. Michael O'Brien:

I would have liked to be able to say the current labour force survey that Bord Iascaigh Mhara is conducting would give that answer but, unfortunately, the way it has gone about the survey means that, not only will it will not reveal how many undocumented fishers are in the fleet, but we will get wrong information down the road. I have engaged Bord Iascaigh Mhara about this. It is carrying out an online survey in the English language and is depending mostly on vessel owners to disclose the composition of their crew. Members can guess that skippers and vessel owners employing undocumented migrants will not disclose that in the survey. I am told it is open for crew to participate but I have made the point already about the language barriers. Basic things like Internet access and so on are extremely difficult. I have put it to Bord Iascaigh Mhara that if it conducts a similar labour survey again, it should engage with us and we could assist in promoting the survey among various groups. We have WhatsApp groups with the language-based communities in the sector.

In terms of our best guess, when the atypical scheme was conceived, the best estimate of the interdepartmental group that proposed the scheme was 500 migrant fishers in the fishing fleet five years ago.

When the then Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine, Deputy Coveney, announced he was setting the cap at 500, the immediate response of the vessel owner representative associations was to ask that it instead be set at 1,000. That gives some idea. Before the deadline for enrolment in the scheme passed in mid-2016, there was an amnesty phase to regularise the situation of pre-existing migrants. Fortunately, the media furore and attention died down and we got some 250 people enrolled. There has been a churn in the subsequent five years but the reply to the most recent parliamentary question on the subject indicated that there are approximately 230 people currently registered under the atypical scheme, spanning 180 vessels. The reply also indicated that 45% of eligible vessels do not employ anybody under the atypical scheme. It is like a leaving certificate maths problem trying to figure out how the 180 largest vessels in the fleet are being crewed if there are 230 atypical workers. Each of them most likely has an Irish skipper. There are one or two Egyptian skippers who have obtained Irish citizenship but they are very much the exception. There are a number of EU-based share fishers from Poland and Latvia, as well as a number of non-European fishers who have obtained a stamp 4 visa for various reasons. The numbers, however, do not add up and the best answer I can give as to how many are involved is "hundreds".