WHY WAS TANK SURVEY KEPT SECRET?
DR Susan Steele has always loved the sea – so much so she decided to become a marine biologist at the age of three.
Today Dr Steele, who swims daily in the sea and jogs to work, is renowned for her impassioned and motivational presentations about the wonders of Ireland’s marine environment.
But Dr Steele is not just a dynamic poster girl for all things marine. As the Chairperson of the Sea Fisheries Protection Authority (SFPA) she is statutorily responsible for protecting Ireland’s seafood resources.
Together with her fellow SFPA members, Micheál O’Mahony, Andrew Kinneen and Seamus Gallagher, Dr Steele is allocated €10m of taxpayers’ money annually to do so.
Dr Steele and her SFPA colleagues, who are paid approximately €90,000 each, are directly answerable to the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine.
But the committee has never been told that in 2013 the SFPA discovered that many of the largest trawlers in the Irish fleet had been caught with fish-holding tanks much larger than declared.
Vessels caught under-declaring the size of their catches should be big news. It should be a positive story for the SFPA as it shows it acting to protect fish stocks. Instead it was kept secret. But why? That’s the question no one is answering.
In a lengthy statement the SFPA did not specify why it kept the tank survey secret. The authority said it used a ‘risk assessment framework’ to monitor suspect vessels more closely as their own survey was being completed.