Thomas Pringle (Donegal South West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome that this report is being discussed in the House today. It is almost 18 months since the report was published and it is important to have it placed officially on the record of the House. I hope it will not be consigned to the record and the archives from this point on.

I pay tribute to the chairman of the committee, Deputy Andrew Doyle. From day one, and particularly after he heard from the representatives of the Donegal islands community about the impact of the drift net ban on their communities, he was keen to ensure that a sub-committee would be established to address those issues. As stated by Deputy Doyle, he does not come from a coastal community. However, he has facilitated any discussions required at the committee and has seen the need for positive action to be taken. As chairman, he has always facilitated discussion by the committee of fishing and fishing community issues.

Before I speak to the report, I would like to inform Members that a documentary, entitled, A Turning Tide in the Life of Man, which documents the campaign by the island fishing communities in Donegal to try to save their community and influence decision makers, will be shown in Galway tomorrow as part of the Galway Film Festival. For those wishing to get a flavour of the background to the committee's work, a trip to the Town Hall Theatre in Galway to see it would be worthwhile.

The report was launched on Inish Oir island in January last year. It was fitting that it was launched there. Owing to weather conditions, flights off the island were cancelled and we had to travel from the mainland on the ferry. It was as though the weather had conspired to show first-hand to the committee members some of the difficulties of island life. The report arises from the fall-out of the ban on drift netting for salmon implemented finally in 2004 and the harm that the ban has had on the livelihood and life blood of island life and our coastal communities. Owing to people's inability to maintain their families through island life, the population of Aranmore Island has declined by half over the past 15 years. This is, perhaps, more starkly highlighted by the fact that in the region of 21 to 23 of Donegal island fishermen have refused the compensation offered by the Government as part of the drift net ban and have campaigned since for some recognition of their dependence on the sea and policies at national and European level that would reflect this.

The report covers nine different Departments and agencies, which reflects the complexity of addressing this issue. More important, it reflects the difficulty of not having one agency with responsibility for what needs to be done. I know from my short time as a Member of this House that it is difficult to deal with any one Department. If one has to deal with two, three or four Departments in an effort to get something done, one might as well forget about it. An example in this regard is Natura 2000 and the many different agencies involved in setting the conservation objectives and the appropriate assessments to allow for aquaculture licensing. The real problem has been trying to get the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, the Marine Institute or the National Parks and Wildlife Service, which is under the aegis of the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, to take a lead in this area. This is an issue which the Government needs to address seriously in terms of driving policy forward. It is important that even where an issue spreads across different Departments or agencies, one of them is forced to take responsibility to drive it forward.

At European level, the Common Fisheries Policy, CFP, adopted last year recognised small-scale and island fisheries in EU policy. What this actually means in practice and what impact it will have remains to be seen. The sub-committee report is another part of the response. Unfortunately, the committee is limited in its power and can only contribute by way of giving a platform to groups that are campaigning and by publishing reports attempting to influence policy at a national level.

There are 29 recommendations in the report, which, if implemented, may go some way to making life a bit easier for our coastal and island communities. They are wide-ranging and include attempts to ensure there are accurate statistics available to decision makers - it is not possible to make good decisions without good information - trying to secure exclusive fishing zones for coastal communities. The recommendations in relation to the Central Statistics Office, CSO, and the provision of particular statistics in relation to coastal communities is important because unless we can point to specific statistics that can demonstrate the impact of policy directly on communities, we cannot ensure we have good policy to be implemented in the first instance.

One of the constant complaints from officialdom in relation to the difficulty in working with inshore fishermen has been that there is not a unified voice. If only they could be like the IFA, it would be so much easier. Recognising this, and arising from the committee hearings, the island communities formed the Irish Islands Marine Resource Organisation, IIMRO, to lobby and work on behalf of their communities. IIMRO has been active since and has appeared before the committee, seeking a follow up on the report and what recommendations have been implemented. This is what is needed because reports should not be published and then left to sit on a shelf.

When the fodder crisis arose in 2013, committee hearings were held on the matter. There were so many members and organisations who wanted to make a contribution to those hearings one often could not get a seat in the committee room. Yet, during the hearings on the damage to the fishing communities following the storms at the beginning of last year, there were hardly enough members available to allow those committee hearings to take place. This reflects the need for lobby groups to ensure one's message gets out.

The National Inshore Fisheries Forum, NIFF, has been established under the Fisheries Local Action Groups, FLAG. Groups have been set up around the country to disperse some of the funding from the European Maritime and Fisheries Fund over the next few years, which is a belated attempt by the Government to provide some benefit to coastal communities that have suffered from the decline in fishing effort. NIFF needs to develop and break out from under the wing of FLAGS and assert itself on behalf of coastal communities. It is early days yet for it and hopefully it can achieve that and be a voice for inshore fishermen and communities.

I would like now to speak to some of the recommendations in the report. No. 10 recommends that the Government examine the feasibility of introducing a system of heritage fishing licences. Heritage licences would recognise traditional fishing methods and traditional fishermen and should recognise communities that depend in whole or in part on fishing as their sole livelihood. Regrettably, the Department does not seem to have done much on this yet. This needs to be addressed, in particular in terms of the low impact that inshore fishermen have on stocks.

No 14 recommends exclusive access for inshore fishermen within the 12 mile limit of national waters. This is a recommendation that I cannot see any Department supporting, unfortunately. However a proactive policy of making fishing opportunities available for inshore fishermen is a vital step, one linked to the previous recommendation.

No. 28 addresses access to social welfare benefits for inshore fishermen. Under class P insurance, share fishermen classified as self-employed can make a voluntary contribution that allows them to claim jobseeker's benefit for 13 weeks per year. After much toing and froing in terms of getting clarification on that matter, the Department has informed me that self-employed inshore fishermen who are sole traders can register under class P and get that voluntary contribution. However, to qualify for this entitlement, a share fisherman must have 260 paid class A contributions since starting insurable employment. This burden must be reduced.

This means that not everyone could have the potential to qualify and for something to be successful, it must benefit everybody.

In recommendation No. 23, the committee calls for relevant statutory instruments to be brought to it for consultation in advance of implementation. This is a practical proposal and should be done anyway as the normal course of events. People would be forgiven for thinking that a recommendation like this should not even have to be included in a committee report, but in terms of good governance, it would be natural to have consultation with the relevant committee.

Recommendation No. 25 deals with the licensing of dual use vessels. If implemented, this would mean that a fishing vessel could be used during the summer months as an angling or tourist vessel, which would provide many fishermen with an alternative source of income and reduce the pressure on stocks at certain times of the year. As things stand, a fisherman would need to have two boats, a fishing vessel and a tourist or angling vessel. This is beyond the means of many fishermen. If we were operating the Maritime Fisheries Fund, EMFF, properly in this State and making the EU work for us, this would be something that the EMFF should and could be supporting. For example, could the development co-op on Arranmore island not be supported to have two or three angling or tourism vessels available that the fishing community could share to provide an additional source of income for the island?

There are many things that should be done to secure the future of our inshore and island fishermen and what is required is the political will and a Department that reflects the desire of citizens to live and work in the communities in which they and their ancestors have lived. Rather than slavishly following EU regulation and implementing EU law as rigidly as possible, we should be adapting policy to support our communities. For example, the ban on net fishing in area 6A, which covers most of the coast of Donegal, had a disproportionate impact on inshore fishermen, who in the main had a very low impact on the stocks that the ban attempted to protect. The Department and the agencies need to start from the point of protecting and sustaining communities and then we would see more positive policy.

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