Mr. Patrick Murphy:

I was travelling from Santiago airport to Vigo. I fear we have some bad news coming with the advice from ICES on the state of the stocks in our waters. I want to explain something that is not really understood. Ireland has two quota-balancing systems introduced that are different and are not in any other country, which prevent us, as a country, from overfishing. Anybody who has a misdemeanour by catching more fish than is allowable in the calendar month must pay it back. The same goes for pelagic fish. We have a self-regulating rule above and beyond the CFP. That is how serious we take ensuring we are fishing sustainably in our own waters. We do not overfish. Even if one vessel, unfortunately, catches more fish than it is allowed in a calendar month, in the system we operate it is then deemed to be overfishing. However, we never exceed the quotas that are set by ICES in the calendar year. If we do, we look for swaps from other countries to take it from them to make sure overfishing does not occur in the vast majority of species in the calendar year, in accordance with ICES. We do our best to make sure of that, even if somebody catches too much fish rather than the fish they are targeting in a multi-stock fishery. When a boat shoots its net, there is cod, haddock and hake that could all come into the net. Depending on what fish they have allowable to them in the calendar month and how much they have caught, sometimes they can exceed that. Then boats move, stop fishing, change their gear or change their net types. A net manufacturer made a statement to our Taoiseach when he visited Castletownbere. He said his job is now to design nets not to catch fish, but to avoid fish. We are trying to develop gear and technical measures that allow us to avoid the fish we are scarce in and to target the fish that we have. There are hundreds of thousands of moneys spent on this and gear trials. We are continuously trying to stay within the bounds of the regulations.

For Ireland, this is really difficult because we do not have a level playing field. As my colleagues have said, that is abundantly clear. We have a system where our regulatory authority has access, to the kilogramme, to a fishing vessel's fish on a day to day basis. It sees what authorisations they have and what fish they are allowed to catch in that month, and it can count down within each month how much fish that boat has left to catch. The authority does not have that data from visiting fleets. We see lorries coming in, picking up fish and going straight out to the other countries and they are checked over there.

I will give one example of the frustration within our industry. We have to submit our sales dockets within 48 hours of landing on the shore. Those fish could be transported to France and it could take 40 hours to get there. By the time they are sold, the skipper of the boat might have landed or gone home. The information might not be back, but he is duty bound to have that information in or it is an infringement and he has broken the law. This is the harsh reality of the implication of the regulation that is applied to Irish vessels, and it is not a level playing pitch. I can assure the committee of that. Other boats come in and their clock starts when it lands on the floor and comes out of the lorry and their control agency starts to look at it. There is not a level playing pitch.

I assure the committee there is no fisherman who wants to destroy his industry on the water. They are completely and utterly frustrated at the amount of activity going on inside Irish waters by visiting fleets. They see the stocks going down every year and they are doing their utmost. I remind the committee that our fleet was 400 vessels over 15 m in 2004. We now have 140 active boats in our fleet. Maybe with the rights there would be 150, so ten more. That is it. This is where my colleagues are trying to emphasise that we are at a crisis point in the history of Irish fishing. Since I have been a young fella, I have never seen the number of boats leaving our ports and harbours around our country. This legislation is not being applied fairly to us and other countries. That is the truth.