Mr. Michael O'Brien:

Sure. I cannot do my work on a day to day basis without having interpretation at my disposal. The Egyptians all come from a small number of fishing villages close to the port of Alexandria. They speak Egyptian Arabic. The Ghanaians, who are another big group, speak a language called Twi. Some speak English, as it is a former British colony, but not all of them do. The Filipinos tend to come from the island of Cebu and speak Cebuano, not Tagalog which is the dominant language in the Philippines. We need to use literature in those languages and have interpretation at our disposal.

Mr. Kelly mentioned in his opening statement a Twitter-based campaign that was run during the summer. It was done in English but WhatsApp and Facebook are the platforms to use to communicate with these people. Twitter is not their platform of choice. I raised that in an email with the WRC when the campaign was being announced.

Another issue is that the Filipinos and Ghanaians tend to live on the vessels; the Egyptians do not. That makes them very difficult to reach. My natural comfort zone is to have big town hall meetings to address everybody at once. It is not always possible to reach everybody. What may work better when doing inspections is to hand out, for example, a business card with a hotline or contact number that would allow a three-way WhatsApp phone conversation between the WRC inspector, the fisher and an interpreter at a time that suits all three. That would be a much better way to proceed.

It would be helpful if all the fishers who came to Ireland under the atypical scheme were made aware of the ITF's existence. Some of them are aware of it but because we lack, mandatory recognition for trade unions, or anything like it, I have to engage in sleuthing and go out and find these people. I even have to go to Senegal in West Africa this Sunday for a week-long conference during which I will have face to face discussions with the Ghanaian seafarers union to try to get an information campaign running in the Ghanian fishing communities in order that some of them would engage with the ITF before they come to Ireland. In that way, we could give them some inkling of vessel owner they would potentially work for and advise them to beware of the various pitfalls. These are the measures we have to take because we do not have the access we need to these fishers before they set foot in Ireland.