‘Ban’ on Donegal pollock hook-and-line fishers ‘unfair’ as super-trawlers ‘hoover up’ fish

Transcript

00:00Mirren Kavanagh is 14 years old, a girl from Arran Moor, island of the coast of

00:05Donegal, and for generations her family have relied on the waters around them to

00:11eke out an existence. Mirren would have fished with a hook and

00:16line to catch pollock. Because she was using a hook and line it's the lowest

00:22impact from her fishing that you can have, most sustainable, therefore the

00:26fish is a really high quality produce. And what has happened is there is a

00:33zero-catch ban been introduced and even though larger boats when they catch

00:40other whitefish can still catch pollock as a bycatch, there's no way at all that

00:47the Irish government can see of allowing Mirren to continue to fish. Now while our

00:55government insists that they are prevented from allowing Mirren to fish,

01:00now remember this is a 14 year old girl using the hook and line means of fishing.

01:06You will see super trawlers off that same coast, off Arran Moor, hoovering up

01:13the sea. We have a 14 year old girl with a hook and line who's told you can't

01:20fish so your living is squeezed and she hasn't accepted it. She wrote to

01:24our Minister for the Marine Charlie McConlogue. Recently she went out to

01:29Strasbourg and she met senior stakeholders out there. So my issue is

01:37is that that particular episode demonstrates the injustice of how the

01:42common fisheries policy is implemented. That you have huge corporations that can

01:47buy up quota all across Europe and of our European member states, put them on a

01:51couple of boats and go out there and do whatever they want and this young girl

01:55can't. And anybody can see that that is not a sustainable and fair system. Of

02:00course the big picture for Irish fishing communities is that we have obviously a

02:06200 mile exclusive economic zone. From 12 miles to 200 that's under the

02:13jurisdiction of the common fisheries policy. The large majority of those fish

02:18caught in those waters are caught by other member states. So nobody's arguing

02:22that that shouldn't happen, it should all just be Irish boats. But they're asking

02:26for fairness. And if you think about climate change, surely it makes sense

02:31that those communities that are closest to those waters would get the first

02:35opportunity, you know, sonal attachment. And indeed that's what the British got

02:39and it was accepted as part of the Brexit deal, that they would reclaim a

02:44large amount of the fish in their waters. That was accepted, that was the common

02:47agreement in terms of the trade and cooperation agreement. And of course we

02:51lost out badly from that. We lost out, you know, 43 million, you know, per annum

02:59over five years. So what's the implications of this failure? I'm using

03:02this opportunity to appeal to our government to have a plan to challenge

03:07the injustices of the common fisheries policy.