Ireland rejects EU plans on fishing rights and waste

IRELAND has rejected EU plans to lease fishing rights to trawler owners and impose a ban on fishermen dumping fish at sea.

Instead Marine Minister Simon Coveney is putting forward alternative proposals, some with the help of France, on how to save the fishing industry and reverse dwindling fish stocks. He said he is winning support from Germany.

The meeting in Brussels was the first time that the Commission’s plan for a new Common Fisheries Policy — with a budget of €6.7 billion post 2013 — was discussed by the member states. The reaction was very mixed.

The most controversial element was to allow member states to allocate quota and the right to fish in their waters for 15 years to the owners of nationally registered vessels.

Mr Coveney said he agreed that something comprehensive and radical needed to be done especially to cut out the massive dumping of out of quota and juvenile fish that in some areas is as high as 70%.

“Moving away from political decision making in partnership with the industry and allocating quota and allowing the market to consolidate that quota into a smaller fleet size is not the way to go,” he said. “If we switched to this system 10 years ago, there would just be two large ports in Ireland now and the quota would be bought out by Spanish trawlers and the catch landed in Spain.”

He added that it would be impossible to build in sufficient safeguards to prevent quota ending up in foreign ownership.

Mr Coveney said Ireland had two potential allies in its fight against the transferable quota model — France and Germany.

He also disagreed with the complete ban on discards — fish thrown overboard by fishermen because they are not supposed to catch the particular species or it is too small. The Fisheries Commissioner Maria Damanaki argues that bringing all ashore is the best way to judge exactly what fish is being caught to allow quota to be properly enforced.

One of the ways of enforcing this would be to have cameras on board vehicles — a number of countries including Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands and Scotland are doing this already as a pilot project.

Mr Coveney said he believes that fishermen would find ways around this system and dump fish out of view of the cameras.

“We want to work with the industry to dramatically reduce the levels of discards”, he said.

The debate and negotiations to teach consensus have a long way to run and Mr Coveney says this issue will probably conclude under Ireland’s presidency of the EU in early 2013.