Pádraig Mac Lochlainn (Donegal, Sinn Fein)
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The Minister will be aware that we dealt with the pre-legislative scrutiny at the last meeting and with the lower threshold for conviction than the threshold of beyond a reasonable doubt. Obviously, every citizen in the State would expect to be convicted beyond a reasonable doubt, which is the globally understood threshold, yet we have in place a threshold of the balance of probabilities, even though the UK, when it was a member of the European Union, interpreted this differently. We are talking about somebody's livelihood potentially being taken away and, certainly, their reputation being affected. The threshold of the balance of probabilities is a serious issue.

I want to link that to the issues that Deputy Collins raised. There is a situation where three national media outlets with wide circulation were clearly presented with this EU audit report, which covers a period from 2012 to 2015 and was submitted in 2018. Clearly, they were provided with this report and that led them to report that there was mass overfishing in the Irish industry by tens of thousands of tonnes. This was at a time when we had lost major quota as a result of Brexit and where we had an industry under the cosh, and it is reported that they have been overfishing and have been messing around with weighing scales, and that the State needs to give back tens of millions.

It made for brutal reading yet nobody in the industry has been given a copy of this report. Can the Minister imagine that I had placed charges against him which affected his reputation and his livelihood, and he was given none of the evidence to justify those charges? Three national media outlets were clearly given a report that the industry has not been given. I submitted a parliamentary question to the Minister and he confirmed that he cannot provide this report.

We then have the SFPA administrative inquiry, which we understand confirms that this report is correct and endorses it. That leads us to this real crisis that affects every single pier and harbour across the State. Does the Minister think it is acceptable that a whole industry, which is under the cosh, would be faced with such damning allegations against its reputation without any right to see the actual evidence on which that is based?