Mr. Andrew Kinneen:

To add to my colleague's remarks on the super trawler question, Deputy Penrose is quite right in so much as the risk associated with such large vessels of environmental damage is great. If they misbehave, they do a hell of a lot of damage. We are very much aware of that.

At present, we have remote sensing equipment and we can tell exactly where the fishing vessel is, its speed and direction. We can infer from that whether or not it is fishing, maybe not to the extent of legal proof but certainly from the point of view of guesstimating what the vessel is up to out at sea.

No doubt it is difficult at times to get aboard these vessels at sea. It is a serious challenge to be deployed from a Naval Service patrol vessel in a small inflatable, get over beside the boat - I myself have done this job a long time ago - , get up along the side of the boat and get over. One can be climbing vertically 10 m or 15 m. It is a difficult job in the best of weather. It is an impossible job in the conditions prevailing in the Atlantic Ocean a lot of the time.

There is a serious problem here. As Mr. O'Mahony stated, we can be sure if the vessels operating inside our fishing waters are fishing or not. We can also be sure if they have a legal entitlement to be there. We are not so sure what they may or may not be doing with regard to high grading or misbehaving with regard to their fish-catching entitlement. It requires going aboard those vessels to verify that.

We are very concerned about this and some years ago, the Sea-Fisheries Protection Authority, SFPA, took the initiative to get control experts from all over Europe on this particular question to look at what measures might be brought in place to make a more level playing field.

The other fishing vessels over which we have control, the pelagic fishing vessels, come into our ports every one or two days. As stated by Mr. O'Mahony, we have a good platform in place for them in terms of controls. They are not foolproof but they are better than what they were. The super trawlers can work away for a number of weeks and then exit our waters without direct control by us. We do have powers to direct these fishing vessels to port, but only with good cause. As is the case of the other fishing vessels we board, we cannot interfere with the normal operation of these fishing vessels without good cause. There are questions to be answered. There is an implicit inequality in the way they operate shoulder to shoulder with an equivalent smaller fishing vessel. We have had anecdotal reports from demersal ground fishermen of large-scale discarding of pelagic species at sea, but we do not know if they come from these large super trawlers or from other pelagic vessels.

We are conscious that there is a problem to be addressed. We have some good technical leads from the remote sensing equipment, and we hope to develop real capacity with it in conjunction with the coastal state unit. We are also researching techniques such as the last haul analysis, which involves a detailed examination of what a trawler brings on board in terms of average sizes to determine whether they are different from previous hauls recorded by the fishing vessel and thereby infer whether there has been abuse of the system. Again, there is a gap between doing that and getting proof of the level required. Reference was made to the criminal law. The standard of proof in terms of bringing cases to court is very high.