Charlie McConalogue (Donegal, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the committee for this opportunity to outline my main issues of concern ahead of the Agriculture and Fisheries Council meeting this coming weekend. To examine the implications for Ireland of quota setting proposals for 2023, a sustainability impact assessment, SIA, was carried out and brought before this committee on 25 October last. The SIA draws its conclusions from a public consultation process with all major stakeholders, including industry representatives and environmental NGOs, and expert contributions from the Marine Institute and Bord Iascaigh Mhara, BIM. I am joined today by Mr. Dominic Rihan from BIM and Mr. Ciaran Kelly from the Marine Institute and, from my own team, Mr. Cecil Beamish and Ms Josephine Kelly. At our meeting we had a good engagement on the issues arising and discussion on how the scientific advice on the state of the fish stock may impact our quotas for 2023.

As the negotiations on quotas for 2023 were progressing, I met industry representatives on 22 November and discussed in detail all issues and our negotiating positions on quota setting for 2023. I heard their concerns and discussed the options that are likely to arise and how these may be pursued effectively to help support our fishing and processing sectors. As the committee is aware, multiple fisheries negotiations of direct concern for Ireland have been going on simultaneously for the past number of weeks. This week alone has seen coastal states negotiations involving the EU, Norway, UK, the Faroes and Iceland on a new sharing arrangement for mackerel, bilateral negotiations between the EU and the UK, bilateral negotiations in parallel between the EU and Norway, and trilateral negotiations between the EU, UK and Norway on setting the 2023 fishing opportunities for shared stocks.

It is useful I think, at the outset, to reflect on the overall situation for the stocks of importance to Ireland. The Common Fisheries Policy, CFP, provides that total allowable catches, TACs, and quotas are set at exploitation rates that can produce maximum sustainable yield. Fishing at maximum sustainable yield, or FMSY as it is known, is the largest average catch or yield that can continuously be taken from a stock under existing environmental conditions and without undermining the future health and sustainability of that stock.

Progress is being made in terms of the sustainability of fish stocks. For 2022, 38 stocks of interest to Ireland have been fished below FMSY. In 2013, only 20 stocks were fished at this sustainable level. So we have gone from fishing 20 stocks at below what was regarded as sustainable nine years ago to 38 now. The number of stocks overfished in 2022 is 15, but it must be noted that this is down by 22 from previous years. This is a significant achievement and Ireland will continue to work with stakeholders, the Commission, other member states and third countries to build on this progress to achieve our objectives of healthy fish stocks and sustainable fishing.

I will now go into some detail on the main Irish concerns and how these will fit into next week’s AGRIFISH Council meeting in Brussels. The EU-UK bilateral negotiations have been going on for four weeks now and I have been closely monitoring developments on an ongoing basis. Obviously, the EU-UK negotiations are something we have only had for the past couple of years and are as a result of Brexit. Prior to that, the UK was another member state and the negotiation around stocks that we fish jointly with it would have been done as part of the December Agriculture and Fisheries Council meeting. Now, that negotiation has to be completed with the UK before we can settle our situation within the EU. These talks are particularly important for us as almost all of our commercial stocks are dealt with under this bilateral process and involve stocks in which we have a particular interest, such as Celtic Sea haddock, west of Scotland stocks and spurdog, to name a few.

We have, at EU level, taken a position that there should be a common approach across sea basins in relation to how to manage mixed fisheries interactions. The UK has been seeking that all our targeted whitefish stocks and nephrops in the Celtic Sea are set below the scientific advice. In negotiations so far, the UK has been seeking to set the quota at an even lower level than what has been scientifically recommended as sustainable. That is its negotiating position at the moment. Here in Ireland and within the EU, we are fully committed to managing our fisheries in a sustainable way and to rebuilding depleted and overfished stocks. We continue to promote the use of innovative technical measures to limit unwanted by-catches of overfished stocks.

BIM has been at the forefront of working with industry to identify and trial effective measures. The EU has accepted many of these measures and these are now a requirement for our mixed fisheries. We support FMSY and we are supportive of setting TACs in all our sea basins at this level and in accordance with the arrangements set down in the multi-annual management plan for western waters.

Unfortunately, the EU and the UK remain quite far apart on a number of issues, and this year, as in previous years, it appears the UK is again attempting to use time pressure leading in to the Council next week to seek concessions from the EU side. This, along with its demands to reduce TACs below the scientific advice for stocks of no relevance to the UK could undermine the economic well-being of our fleets. I have spoken to other EU fisheries ministers on this matter and, at my instigation, I, along with my fellow fisheries ministers from France, Spain, Netherlands, Denmark and Belgium, wrote formally to EU Fisheries Commissioner Sinkeviius last week to insist on these tactics being resisted and to say we should not be afraid of no deal.

We want to follow the scientific advice and I cannot accept going below the recommended levels except in exceptional situations where such a course of action is fully justified. Under the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement, we are obliged to try to reach agreement each year by the 10 December or 20 December at the latest. If that proves impossible, provisional TACs, taking account of seasonality, will have to be agreed at the Council meeting to be applied from 1 January, and talks with the UK would resume in that circumstance in the New Year. The Council adopted provisional TACs for the first three months of the year for both 2021 and 2022 because of delays in securing an EU-UK agreement. While this situation is not ideal, it does, if needed, provide certainty and continuity for our fishing industry in the new year, particularly for the pelagic segment which does most of its fishing in the first three months of the year.

I will now move on to provisional TAC setting.

The European Commission made proposals to set provisional total allowable catch, TAC, levels for 2023 on Monday evening. This is for the potential eventuality that no agreement is reached with the UK before the Council meets next week. It announced those provisional TAC proposals on Monday. I am seeking amendments to these proposals it came forward with for a number of stocks to take account of their seasonality. Some are fished more heavily at the start of the year than later in the year. I will be seeking that the full TAC and quota are set for mackerel and Atlanto-Scandian herring. If an EU-Norway agreement is reached, I will seek that 100% of blue whiting is made available and if the agreement is not in place, that most of the TAC is available for the early part of the year. I will also seek that the porcupine nephrops, or prawns, TAC reflects the seasonal pattern of that fishery. I am hopeful an EU-UK agreement will be in place and that we will not need to set provisional TACs and quotas. In reality, this is an insurance package and one we might have to use so it is important it is available.

I will insist on invoking the Hague preferences, which are an integral part of relative stability. I will insist they are applied in the usual way on relevant stocks. We have always taken a cautious approach to applying them, taking into account the state of each stock, economic necessity and the impacts on others with whom we need to co-operate. As the committee will be aware, the Hague preferences are agreed by qualified majority voting in the Council. Many Member States strenuously object to the application of the Hague preferences as the additional quota for Ireland is deducted from their allocations. Ensuring the preferences are applied in the normal way is a priority objective for me in the negotiations.

I will now set out our position in respect of blue whiting under an EU-Norway agreement. We have a small benefit from this agreement in our quota of arctic cod. The key currency the EU uses to pay for arctic cod from Norway is Norwegian access to Ireland’s 200 mile zone and the transfer of EU blue whiting to Norway from western waters. For the past two years, I have engaged constructively on this issue and the EU has agreed an approach I can support. This involves keeping the transfer of blue whiting to Norway at a manageable level, in percentage terms, which is 4% of the global TAC, and in tonnes, which is 31,500. That is a reduction from the previous 9% transfer which means the transfer has almost been halved.

As a concession to Norway and in order to support an agreement that benefited the other member states, in 2021 and 2022 I accepted that the Norwegian fleet would be granted access to EU waters for blue whiting to all of areas VI and VII which involves Ireland’s 200 miles zone. This exceptional access agreement for Norway was conditional on EU transfers to Norway being set at 31,500 tonnes and in a situation where total Norwegian blue whiting fishing possibilities in the Irish 200-mile zone were much lower than what is being talked about for the coming year. I have made the case that the transfer of blue whiting to Norway should not increase above last year’s level. I am also pushing to have Norwegian access to the Irish zone limited to the total level allocated in 2022. I am keeping a direct line of communication on these negotiations with Commissioner Sinkeviius and have asked him to discuss any proposed movement that goes beyond our stated position in advance.

With regard to coastal states mackerel, the third set of negotiations happening this week of high importance for Ireland is the coastal states consultations on sharing arrangements. This involves the EU, Iceland, the UK, the Faroe Islands and Greenland. The last sharing arrangement ended in 2020 and since then unilateral excessive quotas have been set by Norway, the Faroe Islands and Iceland. I am relatively pleased with how the talks are developing so far as the Commission has taken on board Irish suggestions regarding how sharing arrangements might look in the future and our positioning in these talks. Ireland will continue to work closely with like-minded member states and engage with the Commission to keep the pressure on to get an increased share for the EU. There have not been any significant developments in the talks this week and the negotiations will resume in the new year.

I will now return to other issues that will arise at the Council beginning with bluefin tuna. Ireland has access to a by-catch of bluefin tuna quota, shared with a number of other member states. The fishing industry has been calling for a separate bluefin tuna quota for the Irish fleet for many years. However, tuna quota is allocated each year to member states based on relative stability as established in the late 1990s. At that time, Ireland did not have a track record of commercial fishing for bluefin tuna and accordingly, did not receive a quota allocation. Things have changed. Before Brexit, the UK, like Ireland, as a non-quota holder was only entitled to avail of an EU by-catch provision for bluefin tuna. Under the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement, TCA, to reflect the arrangement when the UK was an EU member state, a small portion of the EU bluefin tuna quota was transferred to the UK. Separately, as a now independent contracting party to the international organisation that regulates tuna fishing, the UK has also received an additional 15 tonne quota. The International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, ICCAT, has now determined that the UK has a quota of 63 tonnes for the period 2023 to 2025 and this is not subject to a by-catch only restriction. If there is a case for an allocation for the UK, there is an equally strong case for Ireland within the EU given the abundance of bluefin tuna in our waters. My team made clear to EU member states and the European Commission at EU internal meetings during the course of last month's ICCAT meeting that Ireland considers there to be a case for an allocation of part of the increase in the EU’s bluefin tuna quota to be made available to Ireland for a targeted fishery. Given the prevalence of bluefin tuna in Ireland's exclusive economic zone, EEZ, we wish this request to be considered at the Council. Opening up this issue will be difficult and other member states have always resisted any discussion on amending relative stability for this stock. I have requested the opening of discussions at EU level to progress our case and I will be making a formal statement to this effect at next week's December AGRIFISH Council.

In respect of fishing areas IIa and IV, I will turn to the issue of the mackerel TAC in Norwegian waters. The questions originally raised by Ireland in September 2021 about the continuation of this quota have now been answered clearly by a legal analysis carried out by the Commission, supported by the Council legal service. That analysis confirmed the IIa and IVa Norwegian waters mackerel quota only ever existed in the context of reciprocal quota transfers between the EU western waters component and Norway. As there has been no Norway agreement in recent years, no transfer took place, which means the quota never left the western waters component. That is the legal reality. This is why the default position is that the full TAC amount should be made available in fishing opportunities to western-waters quota holders from whom it used to be transferred in the past, in line with the normal relative stability key. This view is strongly contested by Denmark, the long standing beneficiaries of this quota. I have said all along that I fully accept that such a scenario would mean a significant quota loss to Denmark and I am prepared to take account of that in our collective deliberations. The Commission proposed five possible ways-forward of which three are possibilities I could consider supporting. The most recent discussions showed that, of those member states that expressed a preference, five were supportive of Ireland and two were supportive of the Danish position. Denmark continues to reject the Commission analysis and insist the quota belongs to it in its entirety. This ignores the clear origin of the quota in the western waters component. Given the divergent views and the concerns expressed by some that this issue could distract from the ongoing negotiations, the Presidency is inclined to leave the status of the TAC for 2023 as “to be established”. This is far from desirable as it means we have lost our rightful fishing opportunities in 2021, 2022 and will possibly lose them in 2023. That said, we have a previous Council and Commission statement to the effect that whatever solution is ultimately found it will be applied retrospectively. This is a complex issue as illustrated by the length of time it has taken to date with no sign of an early resolution. However, Ireland has a strong case and I will continue to press Irish interests for as long as it takes and we will have to wait to see if the issue evolves in the Council.

I recognise the work of the wider industry and stakeholders for their constructive engagement throughout this extremely busy and challenging period. I thank the committee for its interest and look forward to engagement and discussion today on the Council meeting and how we can ensure we get the best possible outcome from it.