Tommy Broughan (Dublin North East, Labour)

I warmly welcome the Minister of State at the Department of Communications, Marine and Natural Resources, Deputy Gallagher, and his key civil servants to the House. Before addressing the Bill, I will refer briefly to the apparent confirmation that a significant element of the marine section of the Department of Communications, Marine and Natural Resources, including responsibility for ports, the coastguard, maritime safety and marine development, is to be transferred to another Department. This cannibalisation of the Department is a regrettable and retrograde development and casts an outrageous, appalling slur on the marine community, maritime workers and the general effort under way to develop the maritime potential of our island nation.

It is also regrettable that the Fianna Fáil Party failed to deliver the categorical promise made in its pre-election programme for Government in 2002 to appoint a Minister with responsibility for the marine and maritime affairs who would sit at the Cabinet table. Not only was the new Department not established after the new Government was formed, the relevant Department did not even include the word "marine" in its title. We now learn that the marine section of the Department will be moved all over the place. Will the remainder of the section be transferred to the Department of Agriculture and Food? The Minister of State, who I understood was to have been given a role in Government similar to that of Deputy Rabbitte when he was a member of the rainbow coalition, is set to be shafted by the Administration instead of being appointed a senior Minister of State with responsibility for the marine with a seat at the Cabinet table. This is a retrograde step.

I pledge that if given an opportunity following the next general election to help shape a programme for Government alongside our Fine Gael Party colleagues, the Labour Party will insist on establishing a Cabinet level Department of the marine, the lead, integrated and coherent section of a maritime Department. Would any other island country settle for less?

I welcome the commitment made by the Minister of State on section 18 and the ludicrous provision on the use of force against fishing vessels. I also welcome his interesting commitment to establish an independent agency to implement the Common Fisheries Policy and sea fisheries control. This is the correct approach and begins to address some of the problems I have with the Bill.

I accept the need for a serious, well regulated fishery control regime. I recently read a book entitled The End of the Line by a distinguished English journalist, Charles Clover who, with many other commentators, has graphically illustrated the dangerous state of world and European fishing stocks and the fundamental necessity to take seriously the maintenance of the fragile marine ecosystem. I also accept that the Secretary General raised genuine concerns about the legality of current fines and penalties for fisheries offences which resulted from the Supreme Court case taken by fisherman, Mr. Vincent Browne.

Sustainability must be the key principle of fisheries management and is a prerequisite for a viable industry. Chapters 2 and 3 of the Bill provide for many important tools to achieve this result. The key failure of the Department in introducing this important legislation has been the virtual absence of consultation with stakeholders and their political representatives. As I noted, this failure has resulted in the developments of recent weeks.

The Labour Party continues to have fundamental problems with the Bill, which is the reason I oppose it in its current form and called a division. They include the level of fines and penalties provided for in section 4 and the lack of consistency with our EU partner states. Fishermen and the representatives of maritime communities have also raised a grave concern regarding the criminalisation of seemingly minor offences.

It must be admitted that the Common Fisheries Policy, in many aspects of its administration, has failed. It was no surprise that at the previous general election, one of the major parties advocated abolishing the policy and starting over again. The monitoring of vessels from France, Spain and other countries is also a key concern. In addition, a question mark continues to hang over the independence of the seafood control manager. I welcome, however, the commitment the Minister of State appears to have made this morning. I will return to other concerns I have with the Bill.

During my time in the House, I have never witnessed such a farcical circus as that which developed around the Sea-Fisheries and Maritime Jurisdiction Bill 2005. When I first read the text several weeks ago a number of issues leaped from the page, including the possible use of force against fishing boats, the high level of fines under the penalties for certain indictable offences, the transfer of the prosecution of sea fisheries offences from the Office of the Attorney General to the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, the precise status of the seafood control manager, an apparent element of retrospection in section 68 and the proposed passage of only 20 articles of the United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea 1982.

I was amazed, however, that the Department did not provide Members with a lengthy briefing document on these and other important matters related to the proposed control regimes. I was also astonished that an abstract of the current proposed fisheries control mechanism was not submitted to the Joint Committee on Communications, Marine and Natural Resources in the summer session or by mid-September at the latest for discussion by Deputies and Senators and consultation between the joint committee and the main fisheries organisations and fishery harbour development bodies.

Instead, we received the Bill a few days after a reportedly acrimonious meeting of the Fianna Fáil Parliamentary Party. A meeting of the Joint Committee on Communications, Marine and Natural Resources was then hastily convened by its Chairman, Deputy O'Flynn. At that meeting, several Deputies from the Fianna Fáil Party stated on the record that they would vote against the Bill because it was extremely harsh and out of line with the regimes in place in our European Union sister states. Civil servants in the Department were effectively hung out to dry and blamed for the Bill, yet it was Fianna Fáil Party Ministers who published and introduced the Bill. On two occasions this morning, during an electronic and a manual vote, Deputies reneged on their commitment and voted for every aspect of the Bill. What arrant hypocrisy.

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