Mr. Jerry Early:

I am joined by my colleague, Mr. Enda Conneely. The Irish Islands Marine Resource Organisation, IIMRO, thanks the Chair and the committee for the invitation to appear and discuss the vitally important Island Fisheries (Heritage Licence) Bill. IIMRO is a member-based organisation with fishers from the islands of Donegal, Mayo, Galway and Cork. Run by and for fishers, it is a member of the Irish Islands Federation and affiliated to the Low Impact Fishers of Europe, LIFE, which represents around 10,000 small-scale fishers across Europe.

Islanders have worked at national and EU level since 2006 to regain traditional seasonal fishing opportunities around our islands.

IIMRO would like to direct the committee to our recent submission on the Island Fisheries (Heritage Licence) Bill for more detailed background and reasoning behind the Bill, and we would also like to emphasise aspects of the Bill here today.

The Bill is a direct response by lawmakers to a recommendation from the cross-party report on promoting sustainable rural coastal and island communities published in 2014. IIMRO would like to publicly acknowledge and commend the work of the previous joint committee and this committee in working to make the Bill a reality.

The purpose of the Bill is to reallocate a small portion of publicly owned quota to boats on the island polyvalent register to allow island communities to co-manage their fisheries and resume a low impact seasonal fishery from small boats. By allocating public quota in this way, different fish species can be caught at different times of the year as they move closer to the islands and as weather allows. Boats are under 12 m and use low impact, non-towed gear keeping to the principle of "the right gear in the right place at the right time".

IIMRO is working with a number of partners such as Trinity College Dublin's centre for environmental humanities to co-design and test new approaches that address the needs of fisheries dependent island communities and meet national and European marine objectives. It is expected that this work will complement the upcoming legislation around the EU marine strategy framework directive and the national marine spatial plan.

The Island Fisheries (Heritage Licence) Bill offers a chance to change a fisheries policy system that has allowed the nation's publicly owned fishery resource to be concentrated in the hands of a few, at the expense of island and other communities, whose populations continue to decline. The European Maritime and Fisheries Fund operational programme summary states that the Irish fishing fleet is characterised by a high share of small-scale vessels and notes that 64% of the total number of vessels are less than 12 m in length, but that these vessels account for only 2% of the total value landed in 2013.

Currently, small-scale vessels on the islands are impeded from accessing the publicly owned quota resource by fleet segmentation and layers of rules that include the requirement to have "track record" in a specific fishery before they can access quota for that species. If a fishing boat did not have catch recorded in certain index years for a quota species, it does not receive quota thereafter, despite the fact that boats under 10 m in length are not required to log their catches. Typically, these are the most valuable species and would give island fishers a more diverse and sustainable income source instead of the non-quota crab and lobster that make up the bulk of catches at present. A list of quota species relevant to the islands makes up part of IIMRO's submission, and the committee will note that it does not include salmon, which is not a quota species under the Common Fisheries Policy.

IIMRO has worked hard with public representatives across Europe and here at home over a long period to ensure the provisions of the Bill comply with the letter and spirit of the Common Fisheries Policy and other relevant legislation. The EU Director General for Maritime Affairs and Fisheries, Mr. Machado, confirmed at a meeting with IIMRO members in 2015 that quota assignment was a matter for the national authority and any allocation for islands within the national quota was not contrary to the Common Fisheries Policy.The Common Fisheries Policy regulation recognises that islands need to be "especially recognised and supported in order to enable them to survive and prosper." Our neighbours across the water in Scotland passed historic legislation, the Islands (Scotland) Bill, at the end of May and islanders here are encouraged by the cross-party support which our Island Fisheries (Heritage Licence) Bill is receiving.

IIMRO is committed to continue working with the Government, other political parties and the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine to make sure the Island Fisheries (Heritage Licence) Bill is the best possible legislation for our island communities. We ask committee members to keep the momentum going so that the Bill can become law. I thank members for their time.