Quota deal ‘robs Irish fishermen’
August 2, 1942 Farms satisfy market
THE Irish fishing fleet is to lose 60 trawlers after the Government failed to recover the 25 per cent quota slashed over Brexit.
The EU, in a new deal between Dublin and Brussels, is to pay €80 million to take the 18-metres-plus vessels out of business forever, leaving only 100 trawlers left in the country.
That compares to the 280 trawlers on our seas only 16 years ago, meaning the Irish fleet is now a third of the size it was in 2006.
Existing quotas from those taking the money and retiring can also not be passed onto younger fishermen and women - they die with the boat.
And only 15 fish out of every
100 caught in our lucrative Irish waters can be landed by an Irish boat for years to come.
Last night, furious coastal TDs accused the Government of mismanagement and destroying the country’s fishing industry forever.
West Cork Independent Rural Deputy Michael Collins fumed: “This fishing decommissioning scheme represents outright robbery, betrayal, and neglect of coastal communities allowing large foreign fleets to hoover up 85 per cent of the fishing quota off our coasts.
Betrayal
“The European Commission €80 million scheme is another shafting exercise intended to reduce the Irish fleet by a further 60 vessels.
“There is a sense of betrayal and neglect felt in our coastal communities including here in West Cork. Our fishermen are no longer allowed to harvest our natural resources as foreign vessels are permitted to literally snatch food from Irish mouths.”
He said that the Government “has failed to protect the sector and was asleep at the wheel during the Brexit negotiations which resulted in a €43 million a year loss in our fishing quota” and its “only solution is to cut the size of our fleet which will put thousands of jobs in the sea food industry at risk”.
Sinn Fein Donegal TD Padraig
Mac Lochlainn said the decommissioning deal is another tragic blow to the fishing communities.
He stated: “The intentional and managed collapsed of our fishing inLast dustry is truly shocking for an island nation that should be maximising our immense and precious resources from the seas around us.
Broken
“Every day our fishing [industry] have to sit back and watch the hoovering up [of] massive volumes of fish from our waters and then transported to other fishing ports.
“Decommissioning will be accepted by some in an industry that has been broken by bureaucracy, inequality, and unfairness from the unjust Commission’s fishery policy and facilitated by a Department of Marine and successive Irish Governments that have been unwilling to stand up and fight Ireland’s corner.
“We are paying the political and practical price of many years of weak representation at the negotiation table.”
year, hundreds of fishermen took to the seas and protested at Cork and Dublin ports at the Brexit quota cuts and demanded the Government go back to Brussels and get them a better deal.
But Ireland returned with a payoff deal instead.
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