Mr. Ciaran Doherty:

I thank the Chairman and members for the opportunity to be here today. Everybody is seeking the figures for the Brexit deal and trying to find out how Ireland ended up in the position we are in.

It is very simple. A transfer to the UK of €183 million is going to happen annually and the Irish industry is on the hook for €43 million of that. How we ended up in this position is not the issue. We are where we are but we have control over what we can do going forward in terms of trying to get something back on burden-sharing. It is very easy to see how Ireland was thrown under the bus on this by Europe. In the context of mackerel, for example, the Irish industry is paying 40% of the transfer to the UK on pelagics alone. This 40% is on an annual basis and it will end up costing between €26 million to €28 million per year. Over a ten-year period, about €260 million to €300 million will be sucked out of the economy in Ireland, and that will have a massive impact on jobs in the coastal communities in which we live.

It is imperative the Government goes back to the EU, outlines the facts and figures to our European colleagues and gets some burden-sharing back for our industry. The amount of money that is being taken out of the industry is unsustainable. If the white fish industry as well as the pelagic sector is included, approximately €25 million of the €43 million is being sucked out of Donegal alone. I do not want to focus solely on Donegal though because the prawn men have lost on the east coast and all of the coastal communities in the south and west have lost as well. We are talking about hundreds of millions of euro being lost to our coastal communities over the next ten years. If there was an announcement tomorrow that companies were coming to the coastal regions to set up new industries that would put hundreds of millions into the economy over the next five to ten years, it would be a big story. Indeed, it would be a great story if it materialised. We have an industry that has been existence in these regions for decades and all it needs is support to continue.

Burden-sharing demands should be coming from our Taoiseach, the Minister for Foreign Affairs and the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine. There should be a joint effort at European level to outline the facts and figures, to try to rectify the situation, and to get some quota back for Ireland. The situation with regard to mackerel in 2021 in the north Atlantic and the coastal states amounts to a smash-and-grab of the quota. It cannot be dressed up in any other way. It is a smash-and-grab and that has been the case since 2010. We in the industry are disillusioned, to say the least, given what has happened in 2021. On the back of the Brexit fallout, we have given away 21,000 tonnes of mackerel or 40% of the mackerel transfer from the EU to the UK. Countries like Denmark have only given away €3 million or €4 million while we have given away €27 million. Countries in the north Atlantic have increased their quota this year by 55% but there has not been one statement from the Taoiseach on fisheries matters. Compare this with countries like France, where President Macron regularly speaks for the French fishing industry. It is time for the highest politicians in the land in Ireland to start speaking up and highlighting what went on in 2021 as regards mackerel, which is the main fishery in Ireland. The 55% increase for certain countries, as Mr. O'Donoghue said, equates to 100,000 tonnes.

By the time this Brexit transfer is over in 2026, Ireland's quota will probably be somewhere south of 50,000 tonnes in total. In 2010, Iceland only had a quota of 2,000 tonnes of mackerel but now it is fishing between 160,000 and 170,000 tonnes of mackerel per year. The Faroe Islands has a quota of 145,000 tonnes, Greenland has a quota of 60,000 tonnes, Russia has a quota of around 100,000 tonnes, while Norway has a quota of 300,000 tonnes, but we cannot even get the European Commission to make a statement on the matter, call these countries out and use the tools at its disposal, like sanctions, to stop them. There is a wall of silence on this. This will have a direct effect on our industry going forward. This reckless behaviour in 2021 will have an effect on future quotas for Ireland because the stock will not take this level of overfishing. Everything they do in the north Atlantic has a direct effect on us in Ireland. What is ironic from our perspective is that the mackerel stock actually spawns in Irish waters, migrates north and then comes back annually, and yet we will have the smallest quota of all of the coastal states.

All of these states, by the way, catch mackerel in international waters. It is imperative that our Government works with its European colleagues to get these coastal states to catch only 10% of the quota in international waters because that is where they are catching all of this quota. They are not catching any mackerel this year in their own waters but they are catching hundreds of thousands of tonnes of the stock and putting it at risk, which will have a direct effect on our industry on the back of Brexit.