Ciarán O'Driscoll: Why 'desolate, despairing' Rockall is so important

The 'desolate, despairing' rock has been the focus of a decades-old dispute. Ciaran O'Driscoll explains why it's so important

Crew of the LE William Butler Yeats boarding the Spanish vessel detained off Rockall in July 2020.

In 1972, the then Scottish Labour peer, Lord Kennet, himself a former seaman, described Rockall as "a dreadful place. There can be no place more desolate, more despairing, more awful to see in the world".

Despite its remoteness, it has been the focus of a decades-old dispute over claims of sovereignty and access to fishing rights around it, as highlighted earlier this month with the incident involving the Greencastle-based vessel Northern Celt.

To help us understand why fishing around Rockall has risen like a spring high tide again to our news headlines, it is best to explain first what and where Rockall is, before we move onto the complexities around why these disputes have happened.

At just over 17m tall, Rockall is about the same height of a four-story building and at 25m wide, could fit twice across Dublin’s O’Connell Bridge. 

Dated to be just over 50m years old, it is all that remains of a long-extinct volcano.

Uninhabited, save for periwinkles and seasonal gannets, the granite outcrop is found deep in the North-East Atlantic. It is about 230 nautical miles (nm) (425km) from the Donegal coast and 167nm (309km) from the Scottish island of St Kilda, which itself has not had a permanent population since August 1930.

Britain formally claimed it in 1955, when two marines and an ornithologist from the HMS Vidal of the Royal Navy landed by helicopter on Rockall, raised the British flag and cemented a plaque onto it. There were concerns at the time that the Soviet Union might claim it as well and build a platform on it to monitor UK missile tests.

It was this action that was the basis for legislatures to formally incorporate Rockall into the UK, which was done with the Island of Rockall Act of 1972. Through the Act, it became part of the Scottish county of Invernessshire, and since 1973, the Western Isles Council.

These actions became the spring from which decades of disputes with Denmark (on behalf of the Faroe Islands), Iceland and Ireland over Rockall have stemmed from. While these disputes are not about ownership of Rockall, they involve competing claims over portions of the continental shelf (seabed) in this area.

A fishing vessel passes the uninhabited island of Rockall, which is now the centre of a dispute involving Ireland and Scotland.

In response to Donegal TD Thomas Pringle in October 2016, the then minister for foreign affairs Charlie Flanagan said that while Ireland “has never recognised British sovereignty over Rockall, it has never sought to claim sovereignty for itself”.

Indeed, due to the lack of competing claims of sovereignty over Rockall by Ireland and others, and not protesting the UK’s administrative control over Rockall, maritime law experts have made clear arguments to the validity of the UK claim to Rockall.

These include Professor Clive Symmons of TCD, Professor Ronán Long of the World Maritime University (Malmö, Sweden) formally of NUI Galway, Professor James Harrison of the University of Edinburgh and Associate Professor Richard Collins of UCD.

Further to this, in 2013, the British and Irish government signed an agreement on fixing the boundary of the continental shelves between the two countries. This was based on a similar 1988 agreement, which set Rockall as north of that boundary.

In the Dáil in 2016, Mr Flanagan elaborated why Ireland did not recognise UK claims over Rockall, by citing the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (Unclos). Unclos, which resulted in a 1982 treaty, was the result of discussions which began in 1956 to anchor common rules for the sea into an international legal framework in the post-World War II era.

He stated that “the consistent position of successive Irish governments has been that Rockall and similar rocks and skerries have no significance for establishing legal claims to mineral rights in the adjacent seabed or to fishing rights in the surrounding seas.” 

He then quoted Unclos Article 121, paragraph 3: "Rocks which cannot sustain human habitation or economic life of their own shall have no exclusive economic zone or continental shelf." 

Mr Flanagan stated that “Rockall falls into precisely this category”. However, Prof Symmons and Prof Long have stated in the past that such rocks can generate 12nm limits. Under Unclos Article 121, paragraph 2, it grants islands the right to have a "territorial sea, contiguous zone, exclusive economic zone and continental shelf".

While paragraph 3 lists exclusive economic zones and continental shelfs, it does not list "territorial sea", which according to Dr Collins, is the legal definition for a 12nm limit.

However, Brexit does complicate matters in sea fisheries.

At the time Ireland and the UK joined the EU in 1973, coastal states could only claim up to 12nm of territorial sea. However, this changed in the 1970s with the concept of a 200nm exclusive economic zone (EEZ) emerging from the third round of the Unclos.

Ciaran O'Driscoll: 'Fisheries management in the North-East Atlantic requires cooperation and compromise from all parties, to ensure stocks are sustainably exploited, so that our fishing communities can continue to rely on them.'

In January 1977, in response to Iceland and Norway unilaterally claiming EEZs at the time, the then members of the EU jointly introduced a 200nm EEZ on Atlantic and North Sea waters, creating a common EU pool of waters, which included Rockall.

Further, since 1970, the EU principle of "equal conditions of access" have been in place, allowing any EU-flagged vessel to access the territorial waters of another. Therefore, from 1977, there was equal conditions of access for Irish vessels to operate in the newly established UK EEZ.

Therefore, in pre-Brexit times, as Ireland did not recognise the UK’s claim to Rockall and the 12nm territorial sea limit around it, the Irish fishing industry pursued EU fishing quotas under the Common Fisheries Policy and operated under the principle of equal conditions of access in waters around the UK, including Rockall.

There appears to have been a "we’ll-agree-to-disagree" attitude from Ireland and Scotland in response to this situation over the years. Marine Scotland, which enforces fishery regulations in Scottish waters, was fully aware of Irish fishing practices in recent decades.

But Brexit will bring this small remote rock to loom large on our horizons over issues of quotas and access. 

And as we know from the Cod Wars of the 1950s and 1970s, right up to the Scallop War of 2018, fishery disputes can quickly climb the political ladder and consume much oxygen.

Fisheries management in the North-East Atlantic requires cooperation and compromise from all parties, to ensure stocks are sustainably exploited, so that our fishing communities can continue to rely on them.

Ciarán O’ Driscoll is the policy and research officer at European Movement Ireland and is from Castletownbere, West Cork