Ireland charged with over-fishing in EU report

IRELAND has been accused of over-fishing by the EU, which yesterday published the first Europe-wide scoreboard of compliance with fisheries rules.

It is understood that a tenth of all legal cases pending against countries that break the fishing laws are against Ireland. Despite the country’s fishing quota representing about 4% of the European catch, Ireland is accused of over-fishing in six instances and of failing to provide information on fishing effort.

According to last year’s EU fisheries inspectors’ report, Ireland took more fish out of the water than their quota allowed. This was for just one of the 58 species we are allowed to fish. But there is no accurate information on Ireland’s fleet capacity, identified as one of the key areas essential to controlling over fishing.