I thank the Chair and Deputies and Senators for facilitating me to join them remotely. I have a long-standing commitment to be out of the country today, so it is greatly appreciated. I realise in making this submission that there are probably a number of elements to it. Apart from outlining the strategic vision, which I have come to do in the opening statement, members probably need to know a little about my background and whether I meet the requirements for this challenging post.
Specifically with regard to this role, it is probably useful for me to say that I have had a good bit of experience over the years in chairing what might be referred to, broadly speaking, as environment-related activities. In the 1990s, I chaired the national rural water monitoring committee, which was a national committee advising the Minister on the upgrading of rural group water schemes, which had reached serious levels of problems in terms of quality and meeting health requirements at that time.
In the early 2000s, I was a member of the three-person group that reported to the Government on Atlantic salmon and the impact of drift netting on Atlantic salmon numbers. That report culminated in the banning of drift netting for salmon.
More recently, I chaired the Water Forum between 2015 and 2021. The forum was essentially concerned with the quality of Ireland's fresh waters and progress on Ireland's commitments under the water framework directive.
Regarding my more discipline-specific background, I worked in a variety of contexts regarding the establishment of the new technological universities, which involved significant organisational upheaval and renewal. I have no illusions regarding the organisational challenges that we are facing in IFI, which I will allude to in the paper. That is my personal background, which is probably relevant to deliberations today.
Regarding my strategic vision, traditionally, the view of IFI was that it was an organisation devoted to protecting fishing resources with a particular focus on poaching and illegal activities around rivers and lakes. That will continue to be the case. The organisation runs thousands of patrols every year. There are hundreds of convictions every year for breaches of that nature. This is clearly a focus we have to continue with. The organisation's specific policing role in the context of fishing is important. Ideally, this probably needs to be extended in order to allow us to cover a wider remit.
Having said that, the first of IFI's legislative functions is to "promote, support, facilitate and advise the Minister on the conservation, protection, management, marketing, development and improvement of inland fisheries, including sea angling". We have a much more comprehensive and all-encompassing brief than is captured merely by the policing role to which I alluded.
In that context, we must be very conscious of the wider biosphere and ecosystem occupied and populated by the Irish fishing resource and of the kind of challenges that have emerged in recent decades. Obviously, climate change is one challenge of which we are all conscious. It is wider than climate change, however. Biodiversity loss, water quality and habitat loss are issues that must be of enormous concern to IFI. Water quality is an issue to which I have been close for the past number of decades. Throughout that period, the overall trend has been negative. The 84,000 km of rivers and the 12,000 lakes we have are all exposed in one way or another to the challenges of declining water quality. Ireland has made some progress in halting the worst effects of declining water quality.
The problem is still a very significant one. There are a number of pressures on water quality, the most significant of which is agriculture or intensive agriculture, and this manifests itself in the most intensively farmed parts of the country, particularly the south east, where nitrates and phosphates are major issues. Agriculture is not the only factor. Hydromorphology is a significant one, as is urban wastewater. When all of them combine, they present a multifaceted challenge to Ireland.
The loss of habitats and biodiversity is increasingly captured in a variety of reports. I referenced the work of Dr. Liam Lysaght, the director of the National Biodiversity Data Centre, who alludes to the fact that we only know the conservation status of about 10% of the 31,000 species in the country. Of those we know, one in every five species is facing or threatened with extinction. Many of our habitats afforded legal protection under the habitats directive are also under pressure. We are experiencing, or have experienced, a catastrophic decline in wild Atlantic salmon, the iconic species of Irish fish. The numbers returning to Ireland have dropped from about 2 million in the 1970s to between 200,000 and 250,000 today. Similarly, the eel population is now at about 8% of where we were in the 1970s. I recently read John McGahern's biography or memoir, where he talks about catching eel in the canals and lakes around Roscommon and Leitrim, and you get the impression that the place was densely stocked. Then, of course, there is the threat of various invasive species and other kinds of challenges around biosecurity, all of which threaten the habitats of our fish.
Moving from that environmental context and the challenging nature of it, and that has to be part of shaping the strategic purpose of IFI, we also have to address the issue of the governance and organisational capability of the organisation. I am obviously very new to the role of chair-designate at this point. I have had two board meetings and a briefing from the entire senior management team as well as specific briefings from various members of staff. I am careful about rushing to judgment or taking any position that is not evidence-based or based on knowledge and exposure to the organisation. Of course, as members will be aware, sometime back in the end of 2022, the then board of IFI was stood down on a no-fault basis and two section 18 appointees took on the functions of IFI. They held that role and made a very big, significant and invaluable contribution, I would say, to stabilising the organisation until their contract essentially ended at the end of December.
In that capacity, they engaged with EY, which undertook an organisational review, so we are well informed at that level of what needs to be done. The organisational review identified 11 tasks, ranging in priority from urgent to less urgent. EY outlined the five it considered most urgent, which have to do with clarity among staff about the strategic purpose and strategic vision of IFI and clarity about the relationship between the board of IFI and IFI’s staff and executive. We at least have clarity now around the issues identified by the study and the incoming board has already appointed a subgroup to examine the implementation of the recommendations of the EY report. I chair that subgroup and will work with the two former section 18 appointees over the coming year on implementing the recommendations.
We moved immediately on preparing a new strategic plan for the organisation. Part of that process will help the organisation to achieve coherence – not merely at senior management level, but right through the organisation. I am conscious that IFI was created from a variety of regional fishing boards. I know from my work with the TUs, which are much more recent, that it is never a simple task to bring together organisations, even those with the same broad purpose, that have different histories, personnel and cultures. To meld those into one national body is a challenge. Failure to achieve that will ultimately create an existential threat for the organisation. I have a sense that the new board and I are coming into an organisation that has experienced a great deal of turbulence and where there are challenges of strategic coherence throughout.
I suspect morale is not particularly high. I have not yet had an opportunity to meet and engage with the staff of the organisation, but I cannot see how hard-working and committed staff could feel other than dismayed by some of the challenges that the organisation is facing and the way in which it has gone about addressing those. This leads to issues of confidence in the organisation both within it and among many external stakeholders.
These are some of the challenges that I am conscious need to be addressed. Speaking as chairperson, it will be important to work with the staff and all external stakeholders on repurposing the organisation and trying to ensure it is fit for purpose. If we can manage that, we will begin to look to cognate bodies with whom we share the broad concerns of IFI. There are many in the country, and there are probably opportunities for the synergies and close working relationships that need to be developed and would have a positive outcome if they were.
I am approaching this task very much aware of the challenges we are walking into.
They are immediate and they are ever present, at the moment. They will require a lot of diligence on the part of the new board. They will require very significant efforts on the part of the board to ensure inclusiveness and engagement with staff in particular right through the organisation to build the horizontal and vertical flows of communication within and outside of the organisation and hopefully to imbue the organisation with a new sense of purpose and collegiality as it goes onwards. I will leave it at that and I am happy to take any questions.
