Dr. Cecil Beamish:

As the Minister said, mackerel is wide-ranging. It comes from the north coast of Spain, up to Norway, then to UK, Faroese, Icelandic and international waters and a little bit over to Greenland. A huge area is covered. We catch 24% of our mackerel in our own 200 mile zone and we catch the rest of it in UK waters, so we fish internationally. As the Minister said, it does a big migration from spawning in the south-west of Ireland up over all of those areas in a feeding migration. It hibernates in Norway at the bottom of the fjords in the middle of winter and then migrates back down again. It is fished all along the migration route.

To manage this, countries in whose waters this happens have a duty to co-operate under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. However, it is only a duty to seek to co-operate. We had an agreement governing mackerel between most of the parties from 2014 to 2020. Iceland was not a party to that but there was an amount set aside for Iceland, Greenland and Russia. That agreement came to an end in 2020 and coincided with the UK leaving the EU and no agreement has been capable of being put in place for the last couple of years. Norway then set a unilateral total allowable catch, TAC, increasing it by 55%. The Faroe Islands followed suit. The EU and UK stayed with their share of the advised global TAC. The result of all that is that the amount of fishing has substantially exceeded what is the scientifically advised amount of catch each year. The concern is that the stock will react to that and we will see a downturn in the stock this year. Our TAC is advised at minus 2% and if fishing remains at its current high levels, we are going to see much more significant reductions.

These are all sovereign countries, so they have to agree to a deal as sovereign parties. There is no mechanism to force a deal. The negotiations have started to try to get a new sharing arrangement in place. There was an initial round in Iceland and the next round happened last weekend in London. The EU is represented by the Commission which is supported by and works with the member states involved. Clearly Ireland is the largest stakeholder in terms of the EU.

What has happened is that Norway and the Faroe Islands have increased their share unilaterally and the UK is now an independent state. We are trying to hammer out an agreement between all those parties and to protect or even improve our share within that. Clearly failure to reach an agreement is not a good omen in terms of the future direction of the stock. On the other hand, the parties have to be willing to compromise in order to reach an agreement.

Clearly a failure to reach agreement is not a good omen in terms of the future direction of the stock. On the other hand, the parties have to be willing to compromise to reach an agreement. It is a process. There is another round set for a couple of weeks to see if an agreement can be reached this year and going into next year.