Joe O'Toole (Independent)

I welcome the Minister to the House. I know the Bill has been discussed at length inside and outside the Houses and everywhere else. I accept the changes made in the Dáil are an attempt to move in a particular direction. I put my hands up and state I come from a biased position. I remember in the nights of my youth watching families of fishermen stand along the quay wall in Dingle wondering whether they would return. I remember major drowning incidents occurring every couple of years.

Something has gone wrong and I want to go back to the root from where all this came. I was in Dingle last August and I spoke to a friend who was in my class in school. He owns a boat which was tied up. The Minister knows why it was tied up, which was to do with the quota. As we were there, two big Spanish trawlers came in to land a catch. One would want to see and feel the way it affected the fishermen to whom I was speaking. They were not able to fish while the Spanish trawlers were able to come in with large quotas.

Two weeks later I was standing in the fishing village of Port-Vendres in France, approximately 10 km north of the Spanish border. I was trying to speak with two French fishermen who had two large half-deckers. We could see a large fishing boat in the harbour. I tried to ask some questions about it and the French man shook his hands and stated it was Spanish. It was exactly the same in France as I had seen a week earlier in Dingle. Huge Spanish trawlers come in and scoop up everything while the local fishing industry is destroyed.

When I was going to school there were approximately four times more local boats in Dingle than there are now. That is the reality. Why does it happen? We have a duty to understand the culture of these people. I want to put it in that frame rather than go through the detail. The point made by the Minister on criminalisation is correct. The point made by Senator Kenneally is equally correct. What level of crime do we mean by this big word?

I regret and object to the way this matter has been personalised against the Minister. It does not help anybody. It is not right and I have objected to it in arguments on this issue. I am sure that when the Minister was growing up in County Meath he and his brothers may have gone into the wrong orchard and come home with a lot of apples. Children would not do so now. The same thing happened in Dingle, although there were not that many orchards. However, there were a good few places where a fellow could tickle a salmon and take it home. It might be looked forward to. Looking back with wisdom 50 years later, was it a criminal act? I did not think of those people, myself among them, as being criminals at that time of our lives. I want to examine the attitude which we are discussing.

I disagree fundamentally with the point debated over and back about the constitutionality of administrative sanctions. The Minister made reference to it in his speech. I will point to other matters in our legislation, such as the way a doctor, lawyer or teacher can be struck off and penalised professionally and the way in which members of the accountancy profession can be penalised and fined by their profession without going to court. This is because it is done by a domestic remedy or process which has a legislative base and which in some cases has an appeal access to the courts. This should have been dealt with in that way. I note the Minister's point that in summary cases a District Court judge must explain why her or she decided not to forfeit the gear. I wish the Minister luck. He may be the only man in the history of the State who can tell District Court judges what to do. What will the Minister do if they refuse? I cannot see how that would work.

My sympathy is with the fishing communities of which I am part. I recently cast a wry smile over a comment by Mr. Ken Whitaker, a national icon who is rightly held in the highest respect. I had this discussion with him some 30 years ago. The question is why we are in this mess. It did not begin on the watch of the current Minister or his predecessor. We have been trying to cope with this problem for 40 years. We lost the game in Brussels in 1973 and every Minister for the marine and agriculture since then has been trying to win back some ground. In my 20 years here I have time and again defended Ministers who have tried to do that.

Where did it go wrong? Mr. Whitaker might look back at some events. The deal we did in 1973 was negotiated during the 1960s and early 1970s on the basis of the first and second programmes for economic expansion, which were put together by the Minister's illustrious former leader Mr. Seán Lemass and his equally illustrious Secretary of the Department of Finance, Mr. Whitaker. I suffered through those two programmes for economic expansion during my first year of economics at UCD with Dr. Garrett FitzGerald many years ago. These superb programmes covered the development of every aspect of Irish life and Mr. Whitaker was part of that.

The year after he retired he wrote a book in which he told how he took up fly fishing when he retired from the Civil Service at 65 years of age. When I met him I said it was a pity he had not taken it up 20 years earlier because fishing is the one aspect of Irish life that is ignored in the first and second programmes for economic expansion on the basis of which we did our negotiations for Europe. That is the source of the problem and only by returning to that point can we resolve it. Our fishermen have been hammered since then.

The Dublin attitude to fishing is rightly based on book learning. I must query some of the statistics I see, for example this year's mackerel quotas. Fishermen on the west coast told me there was an extraordinary run of mackerel from Scotland down to the Blaskets. Why can we not have up-to-date figures? Can the Minister rely on the figures he receives? Either they are not factually based or people are dreaming. We must examine this issue. In terms of Ireland's background and coastline the quotas are destroying us. We must take action on this and give space to fishermen.

I grew up among fishermen and went to school with their children, some of whom went on to fish, and I can say they are the most awkward people in the world. I am not saying I would be any different if I was reared in a milieu where I had to listen to the weather forecast to know whether I could go to work. Would any of us be any different? Generations have lived with their lives and work continually at the mercy of the elements. Although they do not take kindly to people interfering they have to put up with it and have shown a willingness to change, perhaps not as quickly as people might like them to, and have accepted the need for regulation and quotas.

Part of the problem is that fishermen are not sufficiently involved in the decisions. In other countries the fishermen are involved in the policing of salmon stocks, regulation and the fishing period. Although regulation and restriction is required, stopping fishermen at sea from netting salmon is not necessarily the way to deal with the salmon issue. In Canada a certain number of salmon are required up-river to replenish stocks and feed wildlife. Rather than having quotas, which are cumbersome and difficult to police, or dates which are taken out of the air, people may not fish for salmon until the agreed stock level is reached. Why could we not trust the fishermen and do that here?

As most salmon go up the smaller rivers, could the Minister have these rivers examined? Could people examine the second run of salmon in the year when low levels of water in small rivers prevent many salmon from swimming up-stream and replenishing stocks? Practical action must be taken. We do not need an involved argument about what is happening with the salmon run in Kilkenny. Action must be taken on small rivers all over the country.

We should ask the fishermen how this can be done with a certain level of administrative penalisation and summary conviction as in the legislation for those guilty of serious crime. The examples the Minister gave on the airwaves were criminal acts. I have no problem with doing what must be done to deal with those people and nor do Senators Kenneally and McHugh. If we put the word "serious" before "crime" we have serious crime producing serious criminals. I agree with the Minister on that but we must help the smaller operators and those working day to day and week to week for a living.

I am glad the Minister has simplified the registration process although I have not examined the details. Previously it was a nightmare and many people will welcome the change. Before now it was as easy to register the QE2 as a half-decker, so that will help.

There is not enough technical support on new species for the deep-sea fishing industry. I recently read about the various species and despite my reasonable knowledge I saw fish whose names and shapes were unknown to me. Is enough work being done to present new opportunities to the fishing industry? Aquaculture, which the Minister mentioned, needs a push to make sure fishermen fishing at sea can also have aquaculture interests. That has not happened to date but we need to promote it to add consistency to fishermen's incomes.

We must examine the green wellington and tweed brigade. While aspects of fish farming may not appeal to people from Dublin 4, it is a real opportunity and must be progressed. There are developments in places, such as Oileán Cléire, and fish farming for species such as turbot is being researched. There is a future there as well that needs to be looked at. Senator Kenneally and I were talking about the buying out of licences issue, which I find extremely sad. I do not want to see the industry die. I want to know how we can make it work. I know the Minister is motivated by that, as well. There is a certain block in this regard, however. I am upset by what is happening to fishermen. I do not deny the Minister is well motivated, but I believe the projected outcome is wrong. My thinking on this is along the lines being advocated by Senators McHugh and Kenneally. Can we find the right balance? I believe we have missed it.

This is a difficult ministerial brief and it should not be personalised. People must accept that the Minister is doing what he believes to be right in this. I ask him to soften his approach, as well, to see how we may ensure that people working in fisheries as well as the industry itself are protected. We also need to look at what may be put in place to help them. Proactive steps are needed to put additional opportunities in place. Can we do that? How can we make it work? Numerous people cannot get through the bureaucracy. Senator Kenneally gave an example as regards legal costs, etc. In the last Seanad, Senator Tom Fitzgerald, who was born and reared a fisherman, had stories every week about matters that were annoying him in this regard, about somebody going into the wrong port, for instance. If one is on the wrong side of the Dingle peninsula in a "sou'wester", it is much easier to go into Fenit than Dingle, or wherever. If someone goes into the wrong port, however, suddenly he or she is in breach of the law. There is a lack of consistency and flexibility in dealing with this matter.

Finally, the Minister will not be short of support as regards bolstering the fishing industry. I believe the industry is getting the wrong end of the stick from this piece of legislation. I appeal to him to soften his view on it and to approach it from three levels rather than two. He has achieved something good in softening his approach in the other House. Another step is needed, however — the introduction of an administrative process that has a legislative base and which facilitates access to the courts by either side, if that did not work out. I believe this is possible and there is parallel legislation in place to facilitate such an initiative. I ask the Minister to consider it.