Brendan Smith (Cavan-Monaghan, Fianna Fail)

This round of decommissioning grants is a substantial commitment to the seafood industry and will help to put the sector on a more sound financial footing, delivering a sustainable future for Ireland's fishermen into the future. It will help to bring about a viable future for the fishing sectors that will support the economies of coastal communities dependent on fishing.

To meet the challenge of ensuring that the Irish consumer eats more Irish seafood which would enhance the benefits along the value chain to our catchers and farmers, I have recently established the new Irish seafood market initiative under the chairmanship of Jason Whooley, chief executive of BIM. The remit of the initiative will be to maximise opportunities in the Irish domestic seafood market for the Irish fishing fleet and its objective is to bring together fishermen, fish farmers, processors, wholesalers, distributors and retailers to ensure they are supplying the domestic market with as much Irish seafood as possible and to lessen our reliance on imports.

The Minister of State, Deputy Killeen, has also established a new Irish Fisheries Science Research Partnership under the chairmanship of Dr. Peter Heffernan, the chief executive of the Marine Institute, to enable both fishermen and scientists to share vital information. The experience of sharing and collaborating will help build mutual trust and confidence between the scientific and catching communities, the benefit of which will I believe be a better shared understanding of the state of the fish stocks around Ireland. It will, in addition, use the local knowledge of fishermen.

Given that the use of administrative sanctions has been the consistent subject of debate and has been an agenda item for fishermen at all their meetings with me, I also wish to address in some detail the issue of sanction levels in our own national legislation. Fishermen argue that they are being criminalised by being taken to the Circuit Court for minor offences and that administrative sanctions should apply for smaller offences instead of prosecution in the Circuit Court.

In the interest of absolute clarity, it is important to state some facts. Illegal fishing by vessels of any member state in our waters, which in many cases involves non-declaration of landings of key commercial stocks or misreporting of them, is not acceptable and must be subject to dissuasive sanctions. Since 1959, Ireland has applied its criminal law in respect of fisheries matters and, since becoming a member state of the European Community, Ireland has applied the criminal law in the enforcement of fisheries policy. The legislation passed by both Houses in 2006 does not in any way constitute a new approach other than that the maximum penalties are for the first time graduated and lower maximum penalties are applicable in the case of smaller vessels. This is the correct approach.

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