Mr. Micheál O'Mahony:

It is particularly difficult to monitor what happens at sea. As we said, a substantial proportion of Ireland's work is in the area of fisheries control. The vessels in question are not registered with us, which means that they do not land fish here. There is a ping on the vessel monitoring system when they arrive in Irish waters and there is a ping every two hours. Generally, we check with the flag state whether they are authorised to fish and for what and receive an answer from its national fisheries monitoring centre. We then risk assess and generally try to target our available resources at least once per season, if we can, weather permitting. We look at their electronic recording system, ERS. At midnight we are told what they caught on that day while in Irish waters. We do not know what they had on board when they entered Irish waters, but we will know what has been declared on that day. We compare this, for example, to amounts declared for analogous fishing vessels alongside them. For example, if a large pelagic freezer trawler is fishing and has authorisation to catch horse mackerel alone and there is another vessel alongside with mixed catches of mackerel and horse mackerel and it is only logging catches of horse mackerel, there is a risk. The Senator used the words "hoovering" and "dumping", but I say there is a risk that species will be discarded. We identify the risk in that instance and target it, possibly by way of an Air Corps aircraft overfly, weather permitting, or a naval inspection. Those are the steps we can take and we do take them, where appropriate.

There are other steps we take after a vessel has left Irish waters. We have a very close working relationship with our Dutch counterparts. In general terms, the vessels about which we are talking are owned by Dutch multinational companies and fly the flag of various countries, including the Netherlands, Germany, the United Kingdom and various other member states. The port state, the state in which they land fish, is the Netherlands; therefore, if we have a particular concern about what has been caught and logged in Irish waters, we request a flag or port state inspection of the quantities landed.