Apropos of the EU fisheries ministers meeting earlier this week which concluded with an interim agreement on Total Allowable Catch (TACs) and quotas for 2023, I could not help but note that the Czech Minister stated that the deal represented the “best outcome we could secure for our fishing fleets.”
Now, as the more eagle eyed of you and those who are interested in the craft of cartography will have detected, the Czech Republic is a landlocked country. In my cursory trawl of the interweb, I could not find any evidence of there being such a thing as the Czech fishing fleet but I would not be surprised. Indeed, on a quiet night in Tigh Úi Fhlatharta thíos i nDaingean you might be fortunate to catch the strains of Óro Muj maly kanec wafting from the back bar where the fisher people gather of an evening.
Given that Korean and Japanese trawlers ply Irish waters in search of bluefin tuna, that the Norwegians will be hoovering up blue whiting, and that in general Irish fishermen are like the person who is hosting a party and spends the night eating cheese sandwiches in the bathroom while the rest of the guests empty the fridge and larder, there may even be Martian trawlers off Rockall.
Suffice to say that despite Minister Charlie McConalogue’s attempt to pretend that our European buddies are doing right by us, and blaming anything bad on the Norwegians and even the Russians, Irish fishermen have generally not been as happy as Charlie.
The CEO of the Killybegs Fishermen’s Organisation (KFO) Seán O’Donoghue described the negotiations as “futile.”
The basis for this claim is that there has been no agreement on TACs and quotas due to the EU still being in negotiations with the Norwegians and the British. There are over 100 fishing zones jointly managed between the EU and UK after Brexit, and as a large proportion of these impact on the Irish fisheries, this means that it is not yet possible to set TACs and quota for the Irish fleet for 2023. In any event, Irish fishermen will already lose almost 14,000 tonnes of mackerel quota due to the Brexit deal.
The extent of the hit taken for Team European Union by the Irish fishing sector is starkly illustrated by a map from the EU fishing council which shows that Ireland has suffered the single biggest cut in quota since the Brits sensibly decided to up sticks and leave.
Irish fishermen have lost over 20% of quota – significantly higher than the 15% that was claimed by the Irish mainstream media. Even an Irish Times op ed last year was forced to admit that the poor outcome for Irish fishing represented the “opposite of the decisive European solidarity that buttressed Ireland’s efforts to keep the border open after Brexit.”
Of course, “Europe” showed what it thought of any infantile notion that the EU is based on “solidarity” when it railroaded Ireland into an extortionate deal as part of the bank bailout that will continue to indebt us for a long time to come.
As Gript and others have pointed out before, the sell out of one of our key natural resources is a national disgrace.
We are now at a stage where a third of the Irish fishing fleet is preparing to decommission and that will be followed by further departures from a sector that has been deliberately sabotaged by the EU with the collaboration of successive Irish governments for 50 years.
No other country in the world, if it was not an abject cowed and beaten down colony, would accept that its waters are dominated by fishing fleets from other countries, and that the day is not too distant when there will be no Irish boats catching fish off our coast.