Dr. Ruth Brennan:

Thank you, Chairman, for the invitation to address the committee today. I am a marine social scientist from the centre for environmental humanities, Trinity College Dublin. For the past 12 years, my research field has been marine environmental governance. My approach is to identify, support and encourage marine stewardship and co-management within local communities as a means of ensuring effective governance of the marine environment. I support consideration of the Island Fisheries (Heritage Licence) Bill as I believe it has the potential to contribute to meeting our national, European and international conservation objectives for the marine environment, while at the same time providing much needed support for our island based inshore fishing communities for whom fishing is important not just economically and socially, but also culturally.

I will highlight a number of points. First, the Bill responds to and aligns with calls from a variety of committees and policymakers at national, European and international levels to support resource dependent island communities. These include the Oireachtas Joint Sub-Committee on Fisheries in 2014, to which reference has already been made, specifically recommendation 10 of the sub-committee's report. At a European level, we have the Common Fisheries Policy and internationally we have the voluntary guidelines for securing sustainable small-scale fisheries issued by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, FAO.

Second, the European Commission has expressly called for Europe's small-scale fishers to take the initiative. Only last month, on 15 May, I attended a fisheries committee meeting in the European Parliament. At that meeting, Commissioner Vella expressly stated that supporting and helping small-scale fishers is a priority for the Commission. He observed that member state quotas tend to end up in the "same hands" each year at national level and not in the hands of small-scale fishers. He emphasised that the Commission has no influence over how member states distribute their quota at national level and stressed that small-scale fishers needed to help themselves. As an example of an initiative whereby Ireland's island based fishers are proactively doing just that, the Bill should be supported.

Third, the Bill is an important step towards better marine governance. It has the potential to complement conservation measures that are currently in place to protect the long-term sustainability of stocks for the inshore sector, such as V-notching of lobsters and minimum landing sizes for crab, as the introduction of island community quota access proposed by the Bill would enable island fishers to return to a low-impact practice of fishing quota species seasonally, rather than fishing non-quota species all year around.

Fourth, and finally, the cultural importance of a vibrant fishing industry to our island based communities needs to be recognised and supported. The Bill recognises and supports islanders' strong sense of belonging to the sea. I would like to share some research on what I mean when I talk about belonging to the sea. In 2011 and 2012, together with colleagues, I carried out research on the shared maritime traditions and beliefs in two island communities with a strong fishing heritage - one was the island of Barra in the Outer Hebrides in Scotland and the other was the Donegal island of Arranmore. Our research suggested that at the heart of these beliefs and traditions was a feeling that is universally potential in human beings, namely, the sense of belonging to a home place and, importantly, a sense of responsibility for that place. The great Scottish Gaelic scholar, John MacInnes, has described this feeling of belonging as a form of emotional energy, encapsulated by the not easily translatable word "dúchas" in Irish, also "dùthchas" in Scottish Gaelic. Our research described this sense of belonging to the sea, or "dúchas na mara", that we found in these island communities and which is evident from their living knowledge of the sea, its place in their stories, histories and legends, how they have made a living from the sea, how it has helped to shape their conduct and beliefs and from the changes that technologies have brought to their relationships with it. Our research made visible an older and deeper way of knowing the sea which is distinct from but complementary to a way of knowing that is largely informed by book learning and formal education processes.

Further research that I carried out on the Scottish island of Barra demonstrated that this intangible cultural heritage and local ways of knowing and doing are key to informing co-management approaches with policymakers that meet national and European conservation objectives. During the many years of this research, I spent considerable time and energy encouraging community members on Barra to engage constructively with the policy environment rather than pushing it away and, likewise, encouraging Scottish policymakers to recognise the policy value of the island's intangible cultural heritage and local ways of knowing and doing. It is a breath of fresh air to see Irish island based fishing communities being so proactive and constructive in their engagement with the policy environment here, most recently through the proposal of this Bill. I thank the committee and urge members to grasp this opportunity and not to squander it.