Michael Collins (Cork South West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

It is tied into the High Court, the appeal and the balance of probabilities, which is what I want to bring up. The first stage is to put forward an appeal. The Minister wondered whether it was going to be the €25 that the Rural Independent Group put forward in our submission. He did not have his mind made up at all before he came into the meeting as to what was going to happen. At the end of the day, if a fisherman is going to go to the High Court, he needs to know he can afford to go to there. If the Minister cannot, even at this stage, look at that type of an amendment and come in here beforehand to say he is accepting it or not, and that it is going to be €100,000, €10,000, €5,000 or €5, he has not comprehensively considered these amendments at all; rather, he has chucked them in the bin before he came in here.

I am astonished and many fishermen who have listened to this and their organisations are astonished. We need change. We need to go back to Europe. There need to be laws but there need to be laws that are agreed to initially by the fishing industry in this country. The Minister said we are the last boys in the class. Let us be honest. We were the first boys or the whipping boys in the class in the Brexit negotiations, and we got a fair whipping, of that there is no doubt. Now, we need to be the last boys in the class. We certainly do not need to comply with and pander to everything that Europe wants.

We need to be able to put in our own amendments here and our own safeguards for our fishermen who are fishing the waters. They are in a dire situation as we speak. The Minister has said these amendments in respect of the High Court have been comprehensively considered but I am in complete disagreement with that because I can see the way these amendments are just being thrown out one by one. Regardless of what changes we ask for, the Minister is totally opposed to them. I will definitely press these amendments because they are hugely important. Changes need to be made to this before we take the legislation any further. It is the first piece of work that has been done on fishing since the dreadful Brexit negotiations. This is another dreadful thing for fishermen. I will certainly not be in any way, shape or form supporting this. I will be asking to go back and to support the fisherman on this one here. We should go back out to Europe and fight for the Irish because as far as the fishermen are concerned, the fight is being lost. That is my take on it.