COUNTY’S FISHING INDUSTRY NAVIGATING CHOPPY WATERS
FISHERMEN ARE MERELY TREADING WATER AFTER RESTAURANT CLOSURES SEES MARKET COLLAPSE
WITH the water glistening in the Spring sunshine at Kilmore Quay, you might forget that we’re in the midst of a global crisis were it not for one important sight. While ordinarily, the fine weather would result in a mass exodus of fishing boats from the busy harbour, at the moment, they are all tied up.
The quay is very quiet. While usually the noise of trawlers coming and going and fishermen going about their work fills the air, it has been replaced by an eerie silence. The reason is that the Covid-19 crisis has caused the bottom to fall out of the market for fish. With restaurants across the continent being forced to close their doors, the market for highend fish has all but collapsed, leaving some fishermen no option but to tie their boats up for the foreseeable as they would struggle to cover running costs, let alone draw down a decent wage.
The O’Flaherty Brothers are among the biggest fishing operations in Kilmore and, while they are still fishing to an extent, they are left worrying about what tomorrow will bring as they continue to tread water.
‘We’re currently operating at about 40%,’ said Seamus O’Flaherty. ‘We’re lucky. There’s lads down here operating at zero percent. It’s all to do with the markets. Some of them have just closed. It’s mainly to do with the more expensive types of fish - your monkfish, prawns, lobsters, scallops. The market for that has almost completely disappeared because restaurants have closed up their doors and there’s very little consumption. You’d still have some market for the cheaper fish that people would eat at home, but then a lot of fishmongers have closed their doors as well.’
While these are uncertain times for everyone, for Seamus, as he sends boats out to sea, he’s unsure of whether they’ll turn much of a profit on their catch in the current environment at all.
‘The Irish market is very small,’ he said. ‘We’d be exporting a lot of stuff to France and Spain. At the moment, the French market is nearly completely closed while Spain has been drastically reduced. As I said, we’ve probably 40% of our boats out at the moment, but we don’t know what price we’ll get for the fish when they get to Spain. Last week the price was very low. This week it could be even lower. It’s hard to know if you’ll be able to cover yourself.’
All of this is coming off the back of what has been a long winter for fishermen. Horrendous weather conditions have meant that days at sea have been severely curtailed. Heartbreakingly, the weather has taken a major positive turn in the past week and yet still a lot of the Kilmore Quay fishing fleet remains tied up as a result of all this uncertainty.
‘I’d say it was probably the worst winter we’ve had since ‘97,’ Seamus says. ‘But you just have to survive. You have to be able to take a hard winter. There’s one very telling picture down here in Kilmore. At Christmas we all got together and put up that Christmas tree made out of lobster pots and it looked really well. Now it’s nearly Easter and they’re still there. Those pots should all be out at sea.’
‘Things are changing day to day as well,’ he said. ‘We had one
boat tied up there, but an order came in for a certain type of fish, so we were able to send it out. I know there are certain supports for small businesses, but you have to go to your accountant and produce your business plan and the estimated percentage loss and all this type of thing. We’re hoping to avoid that kind of thing at the moment and just keep our heads above water.’
Minister for Agriculture Food & The Marine, Michael Creed said that it is ‘vital for all of us at this time to keep critical food supply lines, such as fishing activity, functioning through this period’. He said that he has sought the ‘making of the necessary legal changes to allow the introduction of Storage Aid without previous quantity restrictions, as well as the provision of additional financial support for the temporary cessation of fishing activity’.
He added that he was seeking the flexibility for member states to fast track the delivery of these financial supports.
‘The key priority for all of us is to take the necessary steps to ensure that producers and processors can continue to operate effectively, that supply lines can be kept open, that we continue to feed people, and that the economic impact can be minimised,’ he concluded.
Local fisherman Eamon Moss has just returned from sea. This time, it was a short three day trip, while ordinarily it could be six or seven. At the moment, vessels are more or less fishing to order.
While Minister Creed has called for financial support for the industry, Eamon sees him as part of the problem. ‘Well he’s the Minister of agriculture as well as the marine,’ he said.
‘That’s part of the problem. Farming will always take precedence over fishing there. When McDonald’s closed their restaurants the other night, we saw nothing but the IFA on the news with the government calling for support. Fishing is like the forgotten industry. For years we’ve been calling for a separate Minister for the Marine, but it’s fallen on deaf ears.’
‘We just need a bit more from the government,’ he continued. ‘We’re not asking for a handout or anything like that. We’re just asking for the same treatment.’
While a lot of trawlers and a good chunk of the scallop fleet are tied up in Kilmore Quay and will remain so for the foreseeable, a small amount of vessels are still sporadically entering and leaving the harbour. However, it’s unclear how long it will be sustainable for them to operate at this level.
In the meantime, as is the case with plenty of other industries, fishermen are watching the news daily and hoping for a return to normality so that Kilmore Quay can re-emerge as a hive of activity once more.