Our fishing industry is in a chaotic state. Over the last four years it has gone steadily downhill. There may be other factors involved but, basically the Government must take the lion's share of the blame because the ills of our fishing industry, which originated in Brussels, have continued over the last four years and festered. The result is that there is great dissatisfaction around our coasts. Fishermen have not been so badly off for many years. At one stage, fish was very scarce because of the inordinate amount of poaching engaged in by our continental EEC partners, principally the Dutch, French and, recently the Spaniards. When we built up our naval protection service, eliminated a great deal of illegal fishing and got viable catches of fish, we found the fish could not be sold at a reasonable price.
If a person is to make his living at any business he must be able to sell his produce and make a fair margin of profit. The reverse has been the case in the Irish fishing industry over the past four years. During the debate on this Estimate some astounding figures which illustrate that point were brought to light. A Government Deputy, the newly-elected Member for Donegal, Deputy Coughlan, supplied us with figures from the Killybegs Fishermen's Organisation which were a damning indictment of this Government and their lack of a fisheries policy and, in particular, their lack of a marketing policy. According to the figures supplied by that organisation, in 1977 a box of whiting would fetch £11.50; today it fetches £8.40. If it is sold into intervention a man will get only £6 for it because, as the Minister of State told us two months ago, the price for whiting sold into intervention has been reduced from £8 to £6 a box by the EEC. This Government agreed to that reduction, despite the fact that costs have spiralled out of all proportion. The costs of running a fishing boat, buying diesel and so on have been multiplied. Nevertheless, a box of whiting which fetched £11.50 in 1977 now fetches the princely sum of £8.40. In 1977 a box of haddock fetched £15; today it is still £15. In 1977 mackerel fetched £3.50 a box; today it is £3.31, another drop. In 1977 herring fetched £14 a box; today it is £12.20 a box. In 1977 cod fetched £20 a box; today it is £17.69. In 1977 haddock fetched £15; today it is £8.40.
How can the Minister say the Irish fishing industry is thriving? He said the prophets of doom and gloom are wrong, that there is no crisis in the fishing industry. Of course there is. Those statistics spell it out, not that the consumer is benefiting from the drop in prices. Despite the prices I have quoted the consumer still pays at least 80p a pound for cod, whiting or any other fish. The box of whiting for which the fisherman gets £5.70 contains approximately 42 pounds when filleted. Sold by the retailer at at least 80p a pound, it will bring in £33.60. This is what is happening. Would you blame the fishermen for complaining? They are paid £5.70 for a box of whiting which sells for £33.60. Cod fetching £17 a box sells at £54.60. This means whiting is sold for six times the amount paid to the fishermen and cod is sold for three times the price paid to the fishermen. A number of people along the line are making a kill. But what is being done to improve the marketing situation? When our fishermen are getting only one-sixth of the selling price, something is very seriously wrong.
In most provincial towns it is almost impossible to get fish any day of the week. It may be available on the Dublin or Cork markets and it may be landed at every port from Killybegs to Dunmore East, but it is not being distributed or marketed properly. The buck stops here. The Minister is the person responsible. There has been a total collapse in the distribution and marketing of fish and that is one of the prime reasons for the present chaos in the fishing industry.
Another reason for the present situation is our inability to negotiate in Brussels. A fisherman has no security. He does not know what the future holds. Now, nine years after our entry into the EEC, we still do not have a common fisheries policy. The French are still insisting that, come 1982, they will fish up to our shores. They should be told to take a run. This thing of safeguarding their fishermen's rights is a lot of poppycock. The French have done more to ruin Irish fisheries than any other country in the world. They persist in fishing with small mesh nets. They kill anything they come across. They have no respect for conservation. They take what they can get and sell it. They eat virtually everything from the size of a sprat upwards. They do not deserve to get a hearing when they start talking about historical rights and fishing up to our shores. Their historical performance has been that they destroyed our fisheries. The French go after the bottom fish and the Dutch are prone to chase herring and, latterly, mackerel. The Dutch have destroyed our herring fishing. These people should be put in their place.
That was the job of the present Minister and his predecessor, Deputy Lenihan, and they failed miserably. The fishermen know it and are feeling savage over the lack of strength being shown by the two Ministers in question at the negotiating table in Brussels.
The best bit of negotiating done for Irish fishermen with our EEC partners was by the present Leader of Fine Gael at The Hague in October 1976 when he got the other eight members to agree that Ireland's case in fishery matters should be given special consideration. I have here a report of the Joint Committee on the Secondary Legislation of the European Communities which states:
It was agreed by the members of the EEC that the Irish fishing industry is unique in the Community in that it is still only at a developing stage whereas the industry is contracting in the other member states.
At that Hague meeting a resolution was passed declaring the intention of the EEC to provide for the continued and progressive development of the Irish fishing industry on the basis of the Irish Government's fishery development programme for coastal fisheries.
That was a firm commitment but where has it gone? What has happened to that resolution? It has been thrown out the window. The French insist that from 1 January next they will fish up to our shores, a complete retraction of the 1976 Hague agreement under which Ireland had a special case. According to the French, the Dutch and the others who signed the agreement, no longer is that case valid. They have reneged on their commitment. The Minister should be in Brussels fighting to see this is not allowed to happen. That is his job.
Instead of getting special treatment for our fisheries we have got nothing, and basically the reason for that is that we made a cardinal error two years ago when we tied ourselves to the British stance in negotiations. The present Minister for Foreign Affairs then came back from Brussels and told us he would adopt the British approach in fishery matters. He had failed to enforce the terms of The Hague agreement. He found the British Minister in charge of fisheries digging his heels in and getting somewhere, so he decided to tag along. But between the jigs and the reels, the British did not get anywhere and in tagging along with them we allowed our case under The Hague agreement to go down the drain.
Here we are back at square one. Under the terms of that Hague agreement we were to be allowed to double our catches in a three-year period. In 1976 Irish fishermen caught 75,000 tonnes of fish and by natural progression, therefore, we were to be allowed to catch 150,000 tonnes in 1979. In the Minister's speech he estimated that we caught 86,000 tonnes in 1979. That in itself is an indictment of our fisheries policy during those three years. Why was that basic element of The Hague agreement not fulfilled if the Government, as they stated in their manifesto, were committed to the development and expansion of our fishing industry? That target was attainable. Why has there been this disgraceful shortfall?
In his statement introducing the Estimate the Minister made great play of the increase from 1979 to 1980 in our fish catches. He told us our fishermen landed 135,000 tonnes of fish in 1980. Let us not get carried away by that figure — let us scrutinise it. We will find that a considerable part of that catch was taken by purse seiners fishing off the north west coast. They took huge quantities of mackerel. Of course, statistics can mean anything if you twist them enough. That is why I am taking a realistic look at that figure of 135,000 tonnes. How much of it was mackerel, how much of it was herring and white fish? If we look at the species of fish taken we will see that a considerable portion was mackerel. Other species mean more employment on boats and on shore.
We may be told that we are making the catch up by taking so much mackerel. My answer is that there has been a disgraceful lack of control of the manner in which mackerel are being caught by purse seining. It is the deadliest form of fishing practised. The fish have not got a chance. Whole shoals of fish are surrounded and caught wholesale. All you need is a 120-foot boat, but in terms of conservation it is a disaster. Purse seining was responsible for wiping out the herring stocks in the North Atlantic and in the North Sea. They then concentrated on the Celtic Sea and we know the result. It was over-fished by purse seining, a practice outlawed in many countries.
Serious thought should be given to whether we should continue to legalise that form of fishing. I live in Waterford. A most modern port was built in Dunmore East because of the herring fishing in the Celtic Sea. Nowadays it is virtually idle because there are no more herring because of over-fishing. We are now inviting the same disaster by allowing purse seining of mackerel off the northwest coast. I do not know if any control is being exercised in this matter. Three or four months ago the Minister admitted that there had not been any reckoning of the total catch in that area. The Minister has admitted that in the years 1979, 1980 and 1981 there have been no quotas — none. The whole stock out there could be wiped out in one year and nobody could be prosecuted for breaking the law because no total allowable catch figures have been set. That is a totally irresponsible position. The most important things regarding fish stocks are management, control and conservation and we are doing nothing in that regard with respect to the mackerel fisheries off the north west coast. I suppose what happened was that there was a bit of a boom, that up to 10 or 12 years ago we saw mackerel only in July, August and September when they came up to the beaches and you could catch them with the hook and a sprat. People did not think they were commercial fish to be netted. First to do that I think were the Kerry and Cork men on the Beara peninsula. In more recent times mackerel have become an all-year-round fishing stock. In our usual and consistent fashion we are about to wipe them out. It is time we had a policy and had control to see to it that there is not complete over-fishing as I believe there is at present, not just by Irish boats but by many foreign countries some of whom are in the EEC such as the Danes whose fishing methods are unscrupulous and ruthless. They have been known to wipe out whole fishing areas all over the North Sea. Their commercial fishing enterprises are capable of taking more fish out of the sea than the remaining EEC countries put together. But they are being allowed in. I should like to know from the Minister who is out there monitoring what is being caught and how much because as surely as day follows night that stock will be eliminated shortly.
Coming back to the position of limits and lack of limits, I suppose it is boring and repetitious to go back to what the present Taoiseach said in 1975 and 1976 and what an array of present Ministers said when in opposition about the fifty-mile limit. In a nutshell it was 50 miles and not an inch less — that was the message. What have we after four years of Government by the very same people? We have the French telling us that they will fish up to the shore from 1 January next, that they will not allow an exclusive limit of one inch, never mind 50 miles. Would the Minister tell us what he is going to do to stop the French from coming in because if they come in they will all come in and the little quantity of fish we are now catching will be lost? It is a very serious situation.
On top of this, looming ahead we have the imminent membership of Spain in the EEC. The Spanish fishing fleet is probably larger than the fleet of any of the present members of the EEC. If they get into our inshore fishing grounds we will get no more whiting, plaice or haddock because they thrive on those species. Presently, we have them kept out to some extent; they are off the Inishkea Islands and the west coast of Mayo and they are getting catches of hake under licence, but when they become EEC members they will not need a licence. They will not be in court as they were in Cork yesterday, ten of them being fined a total of £235,000. They will be thumbing their noses at the Minister and saying that they can fish up to the shore on the same terms as the French. Now is the time to make a stand.
Before we went into the EEC the six existing members of the Community formulated a policy which was so heavily biased in their own favour that it was not funny. Before the Spaniards get in we should get that common fisheries policy finalised and let us keep out at least one set of vultures. We do not seem to be able to keep out the others. I am not confident, seeing the way the Minister is negotiating, that we will have any success in keeping them out. If the fish are there we should be allowed to retain them.
There is much to be said for the IFO suggestion that if these people are going to fish in our waters they should have to land a stipulated amount of their catch in this country. If we were working in other countries I think we would encounter that kind of localised law under which you had to reciprocate so that if you were taking something you would have to give something in return. It should be stipulated that a certain amount of the catch taken by these fleets, French, Dutch or German within our 200-mile limit would have to be landed and processed in Ireland. It is not good enough that they should hare back to their own ports with the whole lot and create employment on a huge scale with what they have taken from our waters.
The ratio of shore-based jobs to jobs at sea in our case is less than one to one. For every man fishing we have fewer than one on shore earning a living in the processing industry. I think what the Minister says in his statement is that in fish processing operations we have 1,600 people employed. That is not something to boast about but rather to be ashamed of. Possibly another 1,600 are employed in transport and ancillary activities but that would amount to only 3,200 people while we have 6,500 people fishing. So, fewer than half are employed ashore and the ratio is about one to .5 which is a disgrace when one considers that the Danes and the Dutch have a ratio of one to seven or one to six. For every fishermen at sea they have six or seven men ashore processing fish. That illustrates how hopelessly we have handled the business of providing jobs. The Fianna Fáil 1977 manifesto made great play with that very point and I invite the Minister to look at it. It said they would provide many more jobs in fish processing. I have not seen them. Over all I think there may have been a drop in the numbers. Certainly, the effort is pathetic.
I have dealt with limits and our collapse at the negotiating table in Brussels and the bad prices Irish fishermen are getting, but the most disgraceful episode of all in recent years has been the way in which the EEC have allowed fish imports from third countries. This is an area where any Irish Minister, seeing the market collapse before his eyes in this country, should invoke his power of veto. That should be done. We are not to be taken as a sop in Europe. We are entitled to stand up and fight our corner. Apparently it is all right for the Germans and the French to trade with the Canadians, the Icelanders and the Norwegians behind our backs but they should not be allowed to get away with it. The primary reason why the price of fish in Killybegs, and our other ports, is as low as I mentioned earlier is imports from third countries. That should not be tolerated. We are aware that countries such as Norway, Canada, the Faroe Islands and Iceland have their own exclusive 200-mile limit. They have excess fish and are only too willing to sell it off dirt cheap. That is what they have been allowed to do for a long time. That represents a disgraceful performance by the EEC and our own Minister. Those countries should not be allowed to glut the markets of Europe with fish.
In league with those countries we have the multinational supermarket chains. The whole fish industry seems to be tied up by half a dozen supermarket outlets which probably originate in Britain or some other part of the Continent. It is those supermarkets, in league with the importers from the countries I mentioned, who are ruining our fish market. Why should Canadians be allowed to dump herrings here in unlimited quantities? The fishermen in my part of the country, whether they were fishing legally or illegally, could not sell their herring catches last winter because the country was flooded with imports from third countries. No attempt was made to stop those imports. In some ports in England boycotts are in operation to prevent imports from Norway, Iceland and other countries but the fish is imported through other ports. All of Europe is being flooded by fish, processed and unprocessed, from third countries. In any supermarket here one will find that shelves are stacked with processed fish from other countries. Very little of the fish on display is processed here although the fish being sold can be caught off our coast. It is an utter disgrace to allow such imports.
For us to have a sound fishing industry we need proper management, proper controls and conservation. That boils down to good policing. The Naval Service are to be congratulated on the wonderful work they have been doing in recent years. They have proved that given the proper equipment they can do a good job.
