Ms Mary Bertelsen:

I worked in the House for more than 15 years as a secretarial assistant and as a parliamentary assistant with former Fine Gael Deputy Andrew Doyle. Around 2016 he gave me a folder. I happened to mention that when I was young I had gone off to sea and had travelled the world working on ships. With that, he took out a huge folder and told me to read it. It took me about three nights to read the story of the Gaffney family and the Mary Kate. An integral part of the job description of a parliamentary assistant or secretarial assistant working for a politician is to have empathy. We have to be able to interpret the constituents' representations and figure out a way to act to help the person or to be seen to help the person.

I met with Mr. Christopher Gaffney and Mr. C.J. Gaffney and I found the representation complicated initially. The more I spoke with them, the more I realised that they were genuine hard-working people. Mr. C.J. Gaffney explained to me all the roads that they went down. When I was with the Deputy, I started all over again so that I could get a clear grip of everything. I discovered that all of these institutions that we believe are there to protect us as citizens seriously failed this family, both at national and EU level. It is unbelievable that there are so many strands to this case.

Mr. Gaffney has already mentioned that from a business perspective, the family bought and sold six or seven fishing boats over a long period of time and they were well respected. Their financial institution had no problem advancing money for the various purchases over many years because they had good credit and they came from good business acumen. At one stage, on a Zoom meeting a few years ago with the department of agriculture, it was insinuated that this was a failed business transaction and it most certainly was not. They had an exemplary credit relationship over many years with their bank.

The Gaffney family fell between the cracks in the system. The boat was just under 24 m long. If the boat was over 24 m long, there would have been EU legislation that would have given some recourse or protection to the family. While they had the requisite insurance, when this issue arose the insurance company claimed that there was a latent defect. There are a whole lot of strands attached to it. After I finished working with Deputy Doyle and even when I retired from the Houses of the Oireachtas, I stuck with the family because it is something I feel passionate about. Mr. Gaffney has already stated that we have written to the European Ombudsman as well as the Ombudsman here. We drafted letters, parliamentary questions and Adjournment debate matters. We followed up with the Irish MEPs, who I must say have been sympathetic. We drafted motions with Wicklow County Council. A few years ago, we put a website together telling the story of the Mary Kate. We put up a petition as an attachment to that website.

There are no words that can describe the magnitude of their financial loss and the suffering they have had to endure over the last number of years, which is of equal importance. They have lost the boat, their fishing licence and their fishing quota. They come from a five-generation family with a proud maritime history. They have lost the shirts off their backs. Mr. Gaffney recently received an award from the Royal National Lifeboat Institution for 60 years of voluntary service to the RNLI. These people are not fly-by-nights; they are genuine people. They are shrewd business people but the systems, somewhere along the line, failed them catastrophically.