Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Thursday, 13 May 2021
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine
Pre-Legislative Scrutiny of the Sea-Fisheries (Amendment) Bill, 2021: Discussion (Resumed)
Verona Murphy (Wexford, Independent)
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I do not want to go around in circles. The point I am trying to make here is the Minister has a report that he needs to deal with. It amounts to €40 million, as the Minister has said several times. We have an enforcement agency that is not answerable to him; it is answerable to a committee. What mechanism can the Minister put in place to ensure that the SFPA does not land us in this scenario again? Apart from anything else, there is very little evidence to support what the EU has said, except that that evidence is based on what has been submitted by the SFPA already. If the scenario the EU outlined to the Minister were genuine, we would surely see some criminal prosecutions or prosecutions of some nature to justify the level of criticism made of the industry.