The last time that Tim Dooley impinged upon my consciousness was in May 2023 when he pretty much tried to persuade Spar to end its sponsorship of boxer Kellie Harrington because she had retweeted a post that referred to the horrific rape and murder of 12-year-old Lola Daviet in Paris.
https://x.com/timmydooley/status/1640628282306510848
Since then Kellie has won an Olympic gold medal. I have no idea what Timmy has been at. Until yesterday, that is, when he declared that he was extremely disappointed that his EU buddies had in effect sounded the death knell of the Irish fishing sector. Well, that told them. They would not want to be disappointing Timmy.
Let us go back a bit. One of Timmy’s predecessors as a Minister of the Irish state was Michael Collins. There the similarities end. Collins as a Minister of the revolutionary Dáil Éireann and in his speeches after the Treaty realised the potential that the development of the fishing sector had – not the least of them being to maintain a thriving Gaeltacht, all of which communities with the exception of Ráth Chairn to this day are inextricably connected to fishing.
In the early 1970s when negotiating the surrender of Irish sovereignty to “Europe,” Timmy’s predecessors struck a bargain with their masters in Brussels that made the Lenape sale of Manhattan to the Dutch for 60 Guilders in 1626 look like the deal for the ages. The Norwegian electorate rejected membership in 1972 in a referendum in which control over fishing and other natural resources were central issues.
While a quarter of the wealth produced in the Irish economy as measured by GDP leaves the state mostly as repatriated profits of overseas corporations, Norway earns around €18 billion each year in net income generated by Norwegians and Norwegian enterprise outside of the country.
As with much of the official narrative regarding all things there has been considerable revisionism about the fishing regime agreed when the Irish state signed up with what was then the EEC in 1973. It was not as though what happened came as a surprise. The surrender of our waters was an integral part of the deal and has lost tens of billions in potential had it remained under sovereign control and been properly developed. The people who rule us have no interest in such matters.
In 2024, an EU Commission report claimed that the Common Fisheries Policy had greatly benefitted the Irish fishing sector. That was disputed by the Irish Fishing and Seafood Alliance who need not have done any more than point out that while the Irish state has more than 15% of EU fishing waters, it is only given 3.5% of quota.
That share was cut by a staggering 57,000 tonnes in the early hours of Sunday. That amounts to a cut of one third on 2024.
The biggest hit was taken by the mackerel boats where the quota has been cut by 70%. This has been described by Dooley’s government colleague, Pat ‘The Cope’ Gallagher as an “open act of aggression.”
Gallagher claimed that the EU’s justification of the cuts on grounds of stock conservation do not hold up. The EU is punishing Irish fishermen, illustrated last year by a 14-year-old girl on Árainn Mhór who was told she could not catch pollock on a baited line while EU fleets can hoover them up a few miles off the Donegal coast.
Some believe that the latest disaster might mean the end of Killybegs as a deep water fishing port. Unless of course they rent the berths and facilities out to foreign boats. That is what the Irish ruling class is good at. Renting stuff out like the state was one big air bnb.
Gallagher observed that Irish fishing communities are micromanaged and under constant watch, but that “Meanwhile, in plain sight, these same countries are fishing 24/7 in our waters without any significant control or enforcement oversight.”
Mark McCarthy of Marine Times News points out now that Belgium has sixteen times the quota granted to Irish fishermen while having a coastline barely longer than Wicklow. Perhaps we ought to demand a share in the Antwerp diamond trade.
https://x.com/MarineTimesNews/status/2000162106575110413
Of course the term “our waters” is meaningless as control has long since been handed over to the EU with the main benefits accruing to our “fellow Europeans” in the ports of Spain, Portugal, France and even Denmark and Belgium. Not to mention the effective incursions by the Norwegians and other non EU fleets.
They are our waters. Just as much as the land of Ireland is ours. Foreign fishing boats ought not to have any more right to the bulk of the catch in those waters than Irish farmers would have the right to rock up to the fertile land of the Rhine Valley and start to harvest potatoes or grapes.
Fishermen and fishing communities believe that the cuts will lead to the loss of thousands of jobs and the Irish Fish Producers Organisation (IFPO) described it as “catastrophic” and will represent a loss of €94 million for 2026, with a negative multiplier impact of around €200 million in associated areas.
Recently we have heard people getting excited about whether the Irish state ought to consider ending neutrality or at the very least buy some fancy boats and planes to defend the country. Defend it against what exactly? Russian drones and so forth.
Certainly not our coastal waters, which have been and will continue to be raided by the factory ships while the Irish fishing sector – and the communities which largely depend on it – is on its last knees.
Anyone familiar with the ports around the coastline will know Irish boats are far more likely to come face to face with the Irish navy than any Spanish or French or even Japanese trawler who locals argue are free from pretty much any monitoring or inspection.
Anyway, it is too late. The only difference really that the latest shameful ‘agreement’ makes is that the final ending of the commercial fishing sector will come sooner than was expected. It was process well in train for many years and hastened by the decommissioning of much of the fleet over the past decade and more.