Mr. John Lynch:

I thank the committee for the invitation to speak about the Sea-Fisheries and Maritime Jurisdiction Act 2006. I will speak to a couple of items that were in the opening statement. First, we do not disagree; we would promote that we have a robust and effective system of control for fisheries in the Irish jurisdiction but at the same time, we think this system should be fair. The current system whereby offences are dealt with under the Criminal Justice Acts is not working. It is not working for the State, it is not working for fishermen and it is certainly not working for fisheries. It is too cumbersome, it takes too long and it has proven to be ineffective and enormously costly for the State and those who are prosecuted. Even for fishermen who have been acquitted, it still costs a lot of money. It still incurs enormous cost for that individual, which is we think is unnecessary. A system of administrative sanctions would work far better - certainly in initial cases. The administrative sanction we do have involves penalty points. That is fine but it is not harmonised with the rest of Europe. We do not have a harmonised system of penalty points across Europe.