Mr. Seán O'Donoghue:

Thank you Chairman for inviting us to the committee meeting today. We have a very serious topic that we wish to discuss, namely, the bad weather that occurred in December 2013 and January and February of this year. In our delegation we also have Mr. Ciarán Healy who is an active fisherman who has not gone to sea since the weather was bad in December. Members can ask questions directly of him as he is someone who is actively affected by what we will outline. There will be no difficulty in that regard.

To put the issue in perspective, we experienced one of the most severe winters, which lasted three months, that has happened in a long time. In the submission which we circulated, which I hope everybody has, we have shown that we had wind gusts of greater than 40 knots, which is gale force 8. One is talking about wave heights of between 5.5 m and 7.5 m. We had 40 days of such weather during a three-month period.

The weather information comes from Met Éireann. It is not something we dreamt up along the way. When one looks at the severe weather events over the four months, one will see the wind gusts of greater than 40 knots to 60 knots were consistent over the period and they were far higher than any of the previous years. There is no doubt we are talking about an extreme weather event. This is not something on which we will seek support from the committee every year. Unfortunately, from a fisherman’s point of view, because of the severe weather events, fishermen were unable to go to sea for a period of almost three months. Any of the lucky vessels that did manage to go to sea – they were the larger white fish vessels – only managed it for a short period, probably up to five days.

We are aware that the Minister, Deputy Coveney, introduced a limited pot scheme. We have only had an uptake of 151 applications out of a possible 1,800. That is a tiny amount of applications. There are a number of reasons for that. The first is that it was very difficult for many small-scale fishermen to find receipts for pots they purchased a year or two years ago. One does not normally keep such receipts. More importantly, the scheme was based on one buying a replacement pot and then claiming the grant support. If one did not have the financial wherewithal then one would not be able to do anything. We brought the situation to the attention of the Minister. FIF has been in touch with him on a number of occasions seeking that an appropriate scheme would be put in place to help alleviate the financial ruin many fishermen face.

We also highlighted that the situation did not just relate to pots. Whitefish vessels also suffered severe economic loss. That is in contrast to what was done in Northern Ireland and the United Kingdom where schemes were immediately introduced. We have been very mean in our attitude towards the situation. I have not gone into all the detail because of the time constraints. In the document we have come up with a number of ways to address the problem. We seek additional funds to be made immediately available by the Minister from the Exchequer. In addition, there is a European maritime and fisheries fund which was agreed at technical and political level between the European Parliament and the Council at the end of January this year. There is a particular article in that which allows for compensation to fishermen in extreme climactic situations. We can guarantee that what we experienced were extreme climactic conditions.

Also, the Fisheries Commissioner, Maria Damanaki, has pointed out that there is scope for compensation under that scheme.

If we do not do something about this issue, a significant number of vessel owners will experience extreme financial hardship. Some of them will have no option but to declare bankruptcy. We are calling on the Government to immediately put in place additional Exchequer funds, and to top up those with funds from the European Maritime and Fisheries Fund, EMFF. That legislation may not be published yet but it can be backdated to 1 January 2014.

This additional scheme must be in place before the end of April. It is very important that the scheme put in place has a user-friendly application process and that it does not require people to put moneys up-front before they can buy gear. If this scheme is to mean anything, the compensation aspect of it must be paid by the end of May.

In essence, we had an extreme climatic event which has caused havoc in the small-scale fisheries and in the whitefish fisheries. We have not got an adequate response from the Minister or the Government in that regard and we are calling for the scheme to be put in place urgently to avoid these fishermen suffering further financial hardship and even ruin.

We have a separate submission, which we are not dealing with today, on the seafarers allowance and other social welfare issues on the fishing side.