I thank the Chair for allowing me to raise the Oriel incident on the Adjournment. The facts are known. The trawler was fishing out of Clogher Head on 8 March. Its skipper was Mr. Thomas Tallon, a 37-year-old married man with four children. At 7 a.m. his trawler began to be pulled astern. He was frightened, as were his crew. After a considerable period with the stern of his trawler awash, the pulling ceased and he thought he was free. He made an attempt to haul in his nets. When he did this he found he was not free and the trawler was pulled fast astern again with the result that he had to cut his gear and lost it all.
It is well known that this problem is exercising the minds of fishermen in the Celtic Sea and the Irish Sea. Comparatively recently a French trawler with ten people on board was sunk with a loss of ten lives. We know that the Sharelga was pulled astern also and that the British authorities admitted responsibility. The HMS Porpoise was responsible. Luckily enough, nobody lost his life as a result. That incident was debated in the House. After a considerable period the Admiralty admitted they were involved. There was a report in The Guardian newspaper the morning the news broke of a submarine lying off the northern coast of the Isle of Man which submerged the following morning having spent the night there. The incident with the Sharelga took place the previous day and the submarine proceeded northwards towards Scotland. If the UK authorities had chosen, they might have concealed their involvement.
In the case of the Oriel, Mr. Tallon's trawler, I made the comment at the time that inquiries should be made of the superpowers who have submarines operating in the Irish Sea. It is unlikely that we would get a positive response. Apparently they are all operating in this area. Even though one could prophesy that there would be no immediate admission of responsibility I was of the opinion that the Department of Foreign Affairs should make direct inquiries of the UK, the USA, the USSR and other NATO countries who operate submarines in the area.
A NATO exercise was going on at the time. The date of this incident was 8 March. The UK charts have the fishing grounds marked on them. A U boat, submarine commander, call it what you will, knows it is moving under waters which are being fished. This poses the difficult question of what to do. Strictly speaking there is no international law which can be enforced if they are outside the three mile limit. Apparently this incident took place outside the three-mile limit as did the Sharelga incident. This matter should be taken up in some international forum such as the EEC in the Council of Ministers, or the United Nations, with a view to having a convention which would cover narrow seas such as the Irish Sea. At least we can be sure it was not a Typhoon of the USSR fleet because this is so big that it could not operate in the Irish Sea. However, there are smaller ones which could operate there.
There is an element of carelessness when submarines go into areas where demersal fish are being sought by fishermen, if they know, as they do from the charts, that they are sailing under areas where fishermen operate.
What information has the Minister for Foreign Affairs or the Minister for Communications received regarding this incident? We know there are nuclear submarines operating and we know that some of them are US submarines, some are UK and some are USSR. In an article in The Irish Times of 12 March it is stated:
One of the main reasons for the apparent increase in submarine traffic around the Irish coast is almost certainly the major NATO sea exercise which began on February 28 and will not run its full course until the 22nd of this month. And by the nature of the naval chess-game for the North Atlantic much of "Teamwork 84" has been concentrating on anti-submarine warfare.
Thus the narrow Irish sea, frequent conduit already for the huge nuclear submarines returning to the US base at Holy Loch and the British base Faslane, up Gareloch in the Firth of Clyde, has become even more crowded as NATO ships and boats exercise and watch Warsaw Pact vessels watching NATO activities.
It is all an interesting game of soldiers except for the defenceless fishermen going about their business. I have made suggestions about possible approaches through the Department of Foreign Affairs or the Department of Communications. I know the investigating team in the Department of Communications is a good one and will make a close, firm and non-sensational analysis of the incident. However, that is not enough if nobody confesses and says they are guilty and if this man has no place to go to look for compensation for his gear.
There is an obligation on our administration to seek to have an international convention drawn up and debated in one of the international assemblies. These are only my own suggestions. Better suggestions may come from the Department of Communications or the Department of Foreign Affairs. The House should take cognisance of the seriousness of the events that have already taken place with regard to Irish citizens, namely concerning the Sharelga and the Oriel, and I might add by way of parenthesis that the compensation has not as yet been paid to the skipper of the Sharelga or to his crew. There were all kinds of fancy promises that this would be done, but up to now the compensation has not been paid. We must not forget that as well as the involvement of our own citizens as mentioned, lives have been lost already. It is too late to try to start some kind of remedy, some way of avoiding this danger, when some of our fishermen lose their lives.
There is no further comment I can make. I mention to the House that this article by Mr. Kiely gives a well-researched picture of one of Her Majesty's nuclear-powered submarines:
HMS Courageous is conventionally armed with homing torpedoes and can be used against submarines or surface vessels ... capable of continuous patrols at high underwater speed, is independent of base support and can circumnavigate the globe without surfacing. She is 285 feet long, has a beam of 33 feet, displaces 3,000 tonnes and carries a complement of 95.
That is the kind of vessel that the little trawler man has to contend with and at present he has no equipment to deal with it and is almost at the mercy of a confession before he can get any remedy if he loses gear or his boat as did the skipper of the Sharelga.
