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Fishing Industry

Dáil Éireann Debate, Wednesday - 1 December 2021

Wednesday, 1 December 2021

Questions (212)

Peadar Tóibín

Question:

212. Deputy Peadar Tóibín asked the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine the amount of fish caught in Irish waters from 2016 to 2021 by species of fish and by the nationality of fishing trawlers in tabular form. [59179/21]

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Written answers

In June 2018 in the context of preparation for Brexit, a fact sheet was published setting out the landings from the Irish Exclusive Zone for the years 2011 to 2015. 

Under the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP), official landing statistics are reported by Member States by ICES division, rather than by Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), and most ICES divisions straddle more than one EEZ area.  Landings are also reported by statistical rectangles - these are the smallest spatial unit by which catches are reported (approx. 36 x 30 nautical miles in size).

In order to estimate the landings from the Irish EEZ, the Marine Instiute has advised that the best available method is to sum the data by statistical rectangle for all of these units in the Irish EEZ. For rectangles that fall partially inside the EEZ, the landings inside the EEZ are assumed to be proportional to the spatial area of the rectangle that lies inside the EEZ.

Annual international landings data, by species and country, at the statistical rectangle level is held by Joint Research Centre (JRC) on behalf of the Scientific, Technical and Economic Committee for Fisheries (STECF).  The data made available to the Marine Institute for the most recent years does not currently provide catch data at country and species level by year on landings taken in the relevant ICES areas..

The Marine Institute has access to the detailed data for Irish vessels, as well as the international data from JRC.  On this basis it has estimated the proportion of the total landings from the Irish EEZ taken by Irish vessels with the balance taken by vessels of other Member States and Third countries. 

The attached tables, compiled by the Marine Institute, set out the weight (in tonnes) and approximate value (in thousands of Euro) of landings from the Irish EEZ by Ireland for the top 25 species for the period 2015 to 2019.  The data sets for 2020 and 2021 are not available yet. 

Table 1 provides a breakdown of the landings tonnage of the top 25 species by year. Overall Irish vessels take 35.5% of the landings but this figure varies greatly by species. If only the species managed under the TAC and Quota system are taken into account, the percentage of landings by Irish vessels is 31.6%.

Table 2 gives an approximate monetary value of the landings by applying the average value (price per kg at first sale) of the Irish landings to the dataset. The percentages per species are the same as the tonnage because the same mean price was applied to Irish and non-Irish landings. The overall percentage of the value of the landings taken by Irish vessels from the Irish EEZ is 38.8% for all species and 36.1% for TAC species only.

I have asked my Department to work with the Marine Institute to prepare an information paper setting out this information and make it publicly available.

Marine Institute Tables 1&2

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