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The agenda for today's meeting is the adapted National Inshore Fishermen's Association, NIFA, proposal for inshore fisheries income stabilisation and a climate compensation scheme. We are joined by representatives of NIFA: Mr. Michael Desmond, chairperson, who is joining us online; and Mr. John Menarry, vice chairperson, who is with us here in the committee room. The opening statement has been forwarded to members but I will allow five minutes for either Mr. Desmond or Mr. Menarry to deliver it. Alternatively, they can give a synopsis.

I remind witnesses and members to keep an eye on the clocks around the room so we can get through the business of the meeting. Once the opening statement has been delivered, we will take questions from members in the order that they indicate. Each member will have seven minutes for both questions and answers.

Mr. Desmond or Mr Menarry may now kick off.

I thank the Chair. I thank the members of the joint committee for giving us the opportunity to state our case once again. Our submission document, A Deliverable Framework for Inshore Fisheries Stabilisation and Climate Adaptation, outlines a structured, practical, and policy-aligned approach to addressing the growing economic and environmental challenges facing Ireland’s inshore fishing sector.

The framework responds to the significant deterioration in sector conditions since the publication of the 2019–2023 strategy, highlighting urgent pressures such as rising operational costs, climate-driven loss of fishing days, market instability and resource constraints. It sets out targeted, EU-compatible measures designed to stabilise incomes, support coastal communities and align with national climate adaptation objectives. The key elements of the proposal include a multi-annual inshore sustainability and resilience scheme, ISRS, to provide income stability; a weather and safety assurance payment, WSAP, to address climate-related loss of fishing days; and a voluntary public goods and sustainability scheme, IPGSS, to support environmental contributions, supporting actions on bait security, diversification and market resilience. The document also outlines a clear implementation pathway, governance structure and realistic delivery timeline, with a strong emphasis on fiscal responsibility and alignment with existing national and EU policy frameworks.

Ireland's inshore fishermen are primary food producers, operating in uniquely challenging economic and environmental conditions. The sector urgently needs financial support to secure its future. Targeted income stabilisation, private compensation and fair access to fisheries resources will ensure the sector remains economically viable, environmentally responsible and socially essential to Ireland's rural coastal communities. Without these supports, the sector will continue to deteriorate, with a detrimental, irreversible impact on rural coastal communities.

Given the scale and urgency of the challenges outlined, we would greatly appreciate the opportunity to discuss this proposal further and explore how these measures can be progressed in a timely manner.

I thank Mr. Menarry for coming in and Mr. Desmond for being on MS Teams.

I am supportive of this document. It outlines what needs to be done for inshore fishermen. They are the backbone of small communities in rural Ireland, like those in Donegal and all over Ireland. Can we ascertain how many days per year they lose due to bad weather? Every year is different and this year was particularly hard in January and February. Do the witnesses have a rough idea how many days inshore men lose in this area in the early months of the year?

We estimate it to be 100 days, but in my lifetime of fishing, I have never seen anything like the past year. We are in the second week of June and I have not been out in the past eight days due to bad weather. There have been three days of gale force winds in the past seven days. This morning the wind is force 6, and in our document the Senator will see that in the first 100 days of this year there were 90 days that had a swell of more than 2 m. Two metres is the minimum reported, but sometimes the swell was 5 m or 6 m. The weather broke in the last week of August last year and we got two storms in the first two weeks of September. Since then, we have just had a day here and a day there. I have never experienced anything like the past year.

I hear from the fishermen off Donegal that they have had the exact same.experience. That includes pot men and everyone. They just cannot go out because the weather is so bad.

Mr. Desmond touched on weather insurance. How would it work? Would it be for a certain number of days per year, for example 100 days? The weather seems to be getting worse all the time. If people sit on 100 days and do 150 days, how would weather insurance work?

It is based on taking the information from Met Éireann for the number of days when the swell was over a certain height. On average, we work ten-hour days on the smaller boats.

We think we are being very reasonable just putting in for €14.10, which is the minimum wage, multiplied by ten hours per day by the amount of days we are off. It is, definitely, at a minimum, 100 days per year now and we put in the minimum in the document. That is what we are basing our figures on. That is coming from swell height from Met Éireann statistics.

On swell height, would 2 m be a cut-off for Mr. Desmond's people going out? I have been told there are parts beside where I live, Doorin, that you would not go out in at all if it was bad because of the swell out there. There are places where swell really becomes a factor here.

Yes, 2 m would be kind of the cut-off. When 2 m is forecast, it is always over it. Small open boats are not going to get out in over 2 m. Maybe some of the bigger inshore boats would, but when we say that there were 90 days where the swell was over 2 m, on probably 80 of those days it was over 3 m and on 70 days it was over 4 m. We put in the minimum.

I have a final question on operational costs. We all know that the costs of running a boat, no matter how small or big, have gone up. How can we put money back into the fisherman's pocket? There is a fuel scheme. Are the inshore fishermen drawing down this fuel scheme or is it complex for them?

I thank the Senator for that question. For the likes of me, I just get a flat rate of €350, no more and no less, because that is the way the scheme was introduced for a boat of my size. That is what I am getting for the rise in the fuel. Maybe Mr. Menarry would have a better idea there because he had to go through the rigmarole of the actual fuel scheme.

It will be good to hear from Mr. Menarry.

I went through it over the weekend and to say it was difficult would be an understatement. I met with the Minister of State, Deputy Dooley, before I came in here to discuss it and try to do something about it. We have an online system that Bord Iascaigh Mhara spent a lot of European money on developing. It is called SmartSimple. That is good old Irish sarcasm because it is neither smart nor simple. Anybody I have talked to, from my accountant to agricultural advisers and others, say they have seen nothing like it for difficulty. Even for me, and I am fairly adept at computers, it is very difficult. I was putting in details as per I was told. They were coming up red and not letting me do it. I had to contact my inshore officer three times and they had to contact the helpdesk at BIM to try to get it through, and we eventually got it through. Even when you clicked on the button "Click here for help", the message came up, "This is not available. Please contact the website owner." When it comes to guys who are not adept at computers, we have seen with the previous support schemes where 900 people applied out of a possible fleet of 1,700. It costs a lot of money to keep your boat up to a standard that you are licensed, so it is not right to say there are 800 vessels on the register, the owners of which did not want to apply for these schemes.

We have highlighted from the start the problems people have with the online process and the difficulties. We have the situation with agriculture where you can get paper forms and even self-declarations for Revenue, etc. However, you have to upload every invoice. You have to upload the corresponding bank details for that invoice to show it is paid and you think that is all done. Then you have to go on to the next page where you have to put in your invoice number, the amount of fuel on the invoice, the price per litre of the invoice and the corresponding file document to show that that invoice was paid. I do not understand, when you give them the invoice, why you have to input the details again.

It is something about which this committee should put a bit a pressure on the Minister of State.

To be fair to the Minister of State, he has agreed to try to hold a meeting between ourselves and BIM tomorrow to rectify it but I do not think one day will fix that.

There have been reports from all the-----

We have been talking about this for years. We raised it several times with the previous CEO of BIM, and every time we raised the issue, it was like the old saying that anything you say will be used against you. It seemed to go further and further down the road. We asked for paper versions to be used, but the CEO of BIM said that going back to using paper would be a backward step. If the last step has not been completed correctly, though, then move on.

It is something that perhaps the committee can discuss and then write to BIM and to the Minister of State to raise the concerns that have been expressed here-----

This is not just about fuel. It is about ongoing issues.

I think this is a matter for-----

I am going to move on.

I have had at least 15 to 20 people applying. No more than was said by Mr. Menarry, it is nearly impossible.

We will action that. We will write to the Minister of State and BIM to raise this concern. I call Deputy Ward.

We are talking about this Smart Simple system moving forward. In all his years dealing with it, and given that issues are constantly happening, does Mr. Menarry think it has been designed to fail?

Anybody I have met has had trouble with it. We raised this issue with BIM before, with the previous-----

How long back was this issue raised with BIM?

We are going back three or four years. This is the second generation. When we are complaining about the last system, we have moved on to the new system.

It was updated and-----

It is worse.

Right. I will move on. Are there any differences between these proposals and the previous ones presented to the committee, and if so, what are they?

I will let Mr. Desmond answer that question.

I thank the Deputy for the question. There are definitely a few differences. The Deputy asked Mr. Menarry about the difficulty with the system. I would just like to point out that if people apply for a grant like a Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland, SEAI, grant to improve the BER rating of their home or to get one of those geothermal heat pumps or something like that, they can go through that process in seconds. If it is something a body wants people to do, it can make the grant application very easy. If it is something it does not want them to do, the grant application becomes extremely difficult and people give up.

Turning to the Deputy's second question, there are a few differences. We got information back from the Department stating that the wording of our first document would just not fly. We had to go further down the sustainability route and more towards the climate adaptation route. It was basically said that because of the Common Agricultural Policy, CAP, the basic income support that farmers are getting is going to be cut over the coming years, so the Department is not going to start another industry on that scheme. Therefore, we changed our proposal to suit what we thought the upcoming EU policy would be.

We ran it through the European Commission as well. Mr. Menarry and I were over with Commissioner Costas Kadis. We explained our situation to him regarding state aid rules and that the Minister of State, Deputy Dooley, and other State officials were saying an inshore financial support package could not be implemented because of state aid rules. Commissioner Kadis, though, assured us it could be implemented in exceptional circumstances once he got it in writing from the Department. Taking everything into account, including feedback we got from previous civil servants, we came up with this document. There is not a whole lot of difference. The difference is in the wording to suit the EU and Government policy on climate adaptation. I suppose that is the answer in short.

I will move on again. Tomorrow, we are going to consider Supplementary Estimates proposed in relation to the fuel support scheme. Is there anything the witnesses think this committee should take into consideration before doing so? I would like to get their opinions.

I think one issue could be the flat rate for vessels under 6 m. I do not think it is very fair that it is just based on size. We have been discriminated against previously for other issues due to size.

I do not think it is fair that a vessel should be given a flat rate based on size. When you compare the cost of fuel for a large vessel to the cost for smaller operators who will have to go the petrol pumps to buy it, where at green diesel was nearly the same price as white diesel at some petrol pumps at one stage in the past while, the difference between dividing it by the tonne and buying it at the pump could be another 30 cent or 40 cent. The smaller vessels are definitely being impacted more severely.

You have got the opportunity when you are there to, let us say, buy it off the harbour master in bulk.

If someone rings the diesel company and says they want a lorry-load of 30,000 litres, they will get it a lot cheaper than they would going and getting it by the litre.

Yes, than going up the road.

The last three or four schemes that the Minister of State, Deputy McConalogue, came up with for inshore were different for boats of over 8 m than they were for boats of under 8 m. I fell under the 8 m category and I am a full-time fisherman, but a part-time fisherman alongside me with an 8.2 m boat got more than me even though he was only at it two months in the year. I am at it 12 months of the year but I get less because of the size of my boat.

Our value to coastal communities should not be decided by the length of our vessels. An awful lot of us in the smaller vessels are full time, and that is something that has to be looked into. It is discrimination really.

Mr. Desmond has said that his friend is doing it for two months of the while Mr. Desmond is doing it for a full year. The details of every application should be considered moving forward.

Definitely so the size of the vessel. If you are an inshore fisher, you are an inshore fisher and we should all be entitled to the same thing. I understand that there are full-time inshore fishers who have had to get part-time jobs. Regarding the criteria we put down in the submission relating to people with full-time jobs, we were told that we would lose credibility by looking for the same. If we were looking for a bad weather payment for some fella who had a fishing licence but was not fishing in the winter, that would not make any sense. The bad weather payment would have to be based on people who were affected, regardless of the size of the boat. It is the fishers who rely on fishing for the winter and who are dependent on fishing for a living who get the payment.

I commend the National Inshore Fishermen's Association on the second document. The association spoke before the committee previously.

I am from the Inishowen Peninsula and there are inshore fishers all around me. I have known them all my life. I took on the role of spokesperson for my party about six years ago. I remember when I first started touring the piers and harbours that I was curious as to whether inshore fishers wanted a financial subsidy. Back then, they repeatedly told me wherever I went that they just wanted to fish.

For NIFA to come forward with this proposal is a clear signal of how serious things have got. There is now undoubtedly a crisis, where financial stabilisation is needed. Under CAP, there have been financial subsidies for farmers for a long time. Regarding artists, there is an acceptance by the State that artists perform a valuable role on behalf of our people, but unfortunately, it is very hard to make a living. That is the reason the basic income scheme, which is a very welcome scheme, has been introduced and extended.

It was Mr. Desmond who first drew the comparison in this committee with the basic income for artists scheme. He planted that in my head and I think he was absolutely right. It is really important that our committee support the principle of a stabilisation and climate adaptation scheme, whatever about the details, which can be ironed out. I will get to a question in a second but I wanted to put all that on record.

There are three aspects to this. The final aspect deals with working with other stakeholders in terms of our marine environment and protecting it. There is financial stabilisation and accepting the reality that climate is having a big impact. We do not want fishermen to be forced to go out and fish in dangerous conditions. There is the issue of working in partnership with other stakeholders and having a bit of financial support to do that. There are plenty of examples of that being rewarded in the farming community. There are lots of financial support schemes for farmers, and rightly so. It is really important that we come in behind the principle that is here.

I have a couple of questions for Mr. Menarry and Mr. Desmond. They are dealing with Michael Berkery right now and he is supposed to be looking at financial supports for the seafood industry as a whole. Could they give us a sense of where that is at right now, as they understand it? They have put this proposition on the table; how does it fit in to that? I had an engagement with the Minister of State, Deputy Dooley, in the Dáil recently on this. In his first reply to me, he talked about state aid and how it prevents any of this from happening. I engaged a bit further with him. Looking at this from a European perspective, there are options when there is a crisis for our Government to ask for a dispensation when it comes to state aid. We see it in terms of the war and invasion of Ukraine and in terms of the Middle East and the increase in prices. You can get agreement from the European Commission to break away from established state aid rules when there is a crisis. When the Government wants to make this happen, it can do it, but it would mean negotiation with the European Commission. What is our witnesses' understanding regarding Michael Berkery and state aid? What are they being told and can they guide our committee in how we should deal with this?

I will come in first and will let Mr. Menarry give his ideas as well. I thank the Deputy for the question. There were three parts to it. First was about us now asking for financial support. We would not be asking for it unless we needed it. We would prefer to be self-sufficient and to be making our living from fishing all year round but it is just not possible any more. In this document, we are not asking for it full-time. It is over the next three years and then to look at it again, because of what has happened regarding Brexit, the war in Ukraine, market collapse and now the price of fuel going through the roof. On top of that, we know what is coming down the line to us with aquaculture as in salmon farming, renewables and closed areas. Should fishermen who have been in the fishing industry for several generations or for hundreds of years be put out of business because of these policies? We do not think so. Unless this document is actually implemented, there is not going to be a future for us.

As for the Berkery task force, the honest answer is we do not know. Since the opening of the task force, we have had two meetings. We have been kind of told that the task force is dead in the water unless the Mulvey report is going to be published. We know that the Mulvey report has been seen by the Department, BIM and our Minister months ago. Like the mackerel report that was supposed to be issued two and a half years ago, it seems to have disappeared completely and one cannot continue without the other.

While the two meetings we had with the task force were good meetings, they were concentrated on one particular thing. The last one was a two-hour meeting and it was just about tax. Yet, we were told to put our submission into the task force. We said from the very beginning that this submission had to be implemented by the Government. As far as I know, the final report from the task force will be due out at the end of June but yet there have only been two meetings of it, so how is that possible? I am after forgetting. What was the Deputy's last question?

It was on the issue of state aid.

There is a huge discrepancy between what we are telling Commissioner Costas Kadis and MEPs from Ireland, and what Government officials are telling them with regard to the state of inshore and whether we need help. There is absolutely no reason state aid rules will not be relaxed in exceptional circumstances. All they need is to get it in writing from our officials that inshore is in trouble and then State aid rules can be relaxed for us, but for some reason that is not happening. The Deputy can make his own conclusions from that.

I thank the witnesses for the work on this. A lot of work has gone into this proposal. As my colleagues have said, the principle of payments for inshore fishers is really important. I have said this many times before but from a cultural perspective it is really important that there is support and maintenance of the sector. It is really important for local, rural and coastal communities. This work is really useful and it is absolutely where we need to be going on it. I have just listened to the discussion in relation to the state aid aspects. That will probably be the biggest challenge to get something like this across the line, but there are ways to frame it in a way where state aid principles or barriers are not as applicable. I know there is the flat rate of €20,000 per year of the stabilisation fund. Did the association consider tying that in more with marine and fisheries protection areas? It would be a much easier thing for a Government to justify that the inshore sector is working to protect the marine as well. I think it would be an easier ask if the Minister is seeking approval of funding for this from the EU. Did the witnesses consider tying those two elements - the first element and the third element where they talk about the environmental management - together so that it is seen more as an environmental and stabilisation fund?

No, not really, is the answer to Deputy's question. We looked on them as two separate issues: a separate payment for voluntary environmental issues and then just a sustainability payment to keep us there to keep tourism coming to small coastal areas. What an awful lot of Irish tourism is based on in these fishing ports around the place is that tourists come to see us. There are probably ways of doing it. We are three or four years now trying to do our own protected areas with regard to bringing in pot numbers. Each person is only allowed to use a certain number of pots for various fisheries. The brown crab working group has met three times over the last three years and we are told by the SFPA that it would be impossible to police anything like those types of measures that we have been asking for. Therefore, we did not tie them in together, but we have come up with other ideas and have contacted local TDs and Senators and the previous CEO of BIM with regard to plastic collection.

There is a group called the Society of the Irish Motor Industry, SIMI. The motor industry is getting a bad rap from environmentalists. Fishermen, to an extent, are being blamed for plastic in the ocean even though 98% of plastic comes from the rivers. The fishing industry along with the shipping industry is responsible for 0.5%. We are collecting plastic every day and taking it to our local recycling centres. We are thinking that if we teamed up with the motor industry to ensure that for every 200 kg or 300 kg of plastic a vessel collects, for each new car that is sold in Ireland the organisation would get €50. We have become a co-operative now, so we can pay a dividend if we ever get into profit. This would be a way of paying the fishermen for cleaning up the ocean. The usual reply I get from every TD is, "Leave it with me." It is the same with the CEO of BIM saying, "Leave it with me." We are trying, but we are just not getting anywhere.

Does Mr. Menarry wish to comment?

On the MPAs issue, we are only at a stage where we are discussing what may or may not need protection. If we align ourselves to that, there is always a danger that because of the low impact of the inshore fisheries, they will say that we are not having an effect on what needs to be protected and therefore they will ask why we need payment to do something we are not having an effect on. There is that end of it. There is also the issue that the likes of FairSeas, which had an event in Cork recently, seems to be leading the charge with this. It is the Government that is doing this. We have the Government that has the money. We saw the Minister of State, Deputy Dooley, give €60 million for trees in County Clare recently. It is not right to say that the state aid rules are an issue. They are only an issue when they do not want to pay out - no more than the BIM online portal. If you do not want to do something, it is easy to find excuses. However, if the will is there these things can be done. We have met with Commissioner Kadis and he has said it is possible. When we said this to a Department of the marine official at the task force, he turned around and said that Commission Kadis did not know what he was talking about.

From the two witnesses, I can hear the frustration in their voices. It is like they are constantly pushing and offering solutions, and nothing seems to be taken up.

We have our document, but I wish to address this to understand how we got here. If we neglect something, when it needs to be repaired it is going to cost an awful lot more than if we had kept up with the maintenance. In 2018, the inshore strategy from 2019 to 2023 identified that the inshore sector "will have a prosperous and sustainable future delivered through a united industry with a strong and influential voice." That strategy offered solutions that were never delivered upon. It was given to BIM to implement. BIM failed us. In 2020, we had Covid-19 where we were offered €500 a month to surrender our licenses - €500 to give up one's fishing business. That is the support that the inshore sector was offered. We had Brexit. In 2022, we had the Ukraine war. When we asked for fuel supports then, the then Minister, Deputy McConalogue, said that instead of fuel supports he was giving an extra month's tie-up scheme for the larger vessels. He said it was worth €12 million that went to the larger vessels. The inshore sector could not use or access it. Now, we have the Iran war. We are finally starting to see some help, but we have been neglected for so long now that the cost of putting things right is going to be so much more.

It is not our fault we have been neglected. We have been asking for help. We have offered solutions but we have been totally ignored, going along.

I thank Mr. Menarry for that because I know it is incredibly difficult. In relation to-----

We will have a second round. I have to go to Deputy Cahill.

That is grand.

I, too, welcome our guests from the National Inshore Fisherman's Association. I strongly support the proposal for an inshore fisheries income stabilisation and climate compensation scheme. Fishing communities, including fishermen and fisherwomen, are on their knees right around the Irish coastline and it is time for action, to put it in a nutshell, before it is too late. There are huge issues and challenges for the sector, including quota cuts, which we have spoken about many times here, fuel costs and increasing operational costs as well as the lost fishing days due to extreme weather conditions. Imported shellfish from South America and Asia have also been mentioned. The committee has also called on the Minister of State, Deputy Dooley, to allow enhanced representation of the inshore sector on the Food Vision seafood sector group. I support that call. The seafood sector is critical to Ireland in the context of the food supply chain. The importance of the supply by Irish fishermen and fisherwomen in that context cannot be strongly emphasised enough.

I am supporting the submission to the Minister calling for a dedicated fuel support scheme. It is absolutely critical. We all know about the increased costs of fuel, etc. I welcome the Government's response in the context of providing up to €15 million to vessel owners. That is hugely important to their survival going forward. The payment of €20,000 per eligible vessel over a three-year period must be considered favourably. I, like my colleagues, strongly support the call for a weather and safety assurance payment to compensate for no-fish days caused by extreme weather. Employees, if one generalises, receive paid days in the context of bad weather conditions when roads are impassible or when there are power outages, etc. It should be no different for the fishing sector.

I am going to ask a question we all know the answer to. If the proper, adequate supports are not put in place, will the NIFA outline what that will mean for the industry going forward? Obviously there will be no industry if we do not deliver on this one.

I can answer that one all right. If we do not get these supports, our sector will continue to deteriorate. It will have a detrimental, irreversible impact on our rural coastal communities because all that is really in the most peripheral, rural areas of Ireland is small fishermen and small farmers. The Deputy knows the number of small farmers who have disappeared over the last 20 years. From my experience of inshore fishing, over the last two decades fishermen were leaving yearly, then monthly, then weekly but this year it has been daily as the weather has been that bad. The Minister of State, Deputy Dooley, was asked about this submission the other day by Deputy Mac Lochlainn. He replied that we have jobseeker's allowance and fish assist.

He also said our opportunities lie in coastal tourism and wind farms. In regard to wind farms, I, along with 90% of the fisherman I know, would never work for those global conglomerates who are going to pour tens of thousands of tonnes of concrete onto the seabed. If we cannot go out fishing, how can we go out doing marine tourism? The weather is bad now which means marine tourism is only viable for a couple of weeks of the year, and that is if we get a good summer. In regard to the fish assist, two of our members in west Cork applied for fish assist in the past year. One got a bad burning and the other fellow got a hip replacement. They both have young kids. One was offered €3.60 and the other was offered €1.80. On the other hand, to qualify for jobseeker's allowance, you have to be actively seeking alternative employment. We are not. We want to stay fishing. That is why we have put this submission together. The areas I am talking about will become absolute ghost towns unless it is implemented.

In our document, for every job at sea we are talking about at least seven jobs ashore. We were questioned on this number by people in BIM. We responded that, if they had a problem with our figures, what were the actual figures. They could not give us actual figures. In the south west of England the UK, our closest neighbour, for every job at sea there are 15 ashore. For every small boat with two or three people on board, there are 20 jobs ashore. When half a dozen small boats are lost in an area, that is a massive thing. It is like closing a factory. However, because we are so small at a grassroots level, it is not seen. We could disappear. If you drive through Sligo, past Mullaghmore, Milk Harbour, Rathlee and Rosses Point there are all these harbours that are never seen, but there is employment, activity and onshore employment. It will get to a tipping point where if we lose too many people from the inshore sector, the onshore services will close. We have seen lay-offs in the fishing industry in the last while because there is not enough activity in the larger vessels to sustain them. If it gets to a tipping point where we lose the inshore sector, the offshore sector then will lose the guys who start off inshore. My own son has started off in a small boat. He hoped to work on deck on bigger boats but they are struggling with crewing problems. The whole industry will collapse if we lose the inshore sector. It is the largest sector of the industry. There will be this situation where we will disappear, so-called seafood will be imported, BIM will report on the seafood industry, millions in value will be coming into the country, and BIM will ask what is wrong, because the seafood industry is growing.

I thank Mr. Menarry and Mr. Desmond for the presentations. There must be something radically wrong where we have a fisherman with a boat of less than 8 m fishing full time and somebody with an 8.2 m boat only fishing for two months of the year can benefit more from the system than the person who is fishing all year round. Something is radically wrong there. I understand that the application for compensation is difficult. People are finding it extremely hard to get compensation. I believe BIM is responsible for administering the scheme. Maybe we should invite BIM to a meeting here to try to streamline this and let it know how people are suffering out there, trying to survive but not able to survive. As has been said already, inshore fishermen are going to be a thing of the past if something is not done. If BIM is responsible for administering this scheme, we should bring it in here and discuss the problems with it.

Does Mr. Desmond or Mr. Menarry wish to respond to that point?

I will come in on that. The Deputy mentioned assistance. It was a pittance, but in fairness to the former Minister, Deputy McConalogue, he came up with three schemes for us. They were very low but were just to get us through when things were extra bad. Some people are looking on the fuel scheme as if it is helping us. All it is is giving us back a fraction of the increase in the price of fuel. It is not offsetting it or anything; our fuel is still way dearer. Before we entered the fuel crisis, we were in huge trouble anyway and this added to it. We have gone way past fuel support. While it is called a fuel support, it is not covering the increase. It is just covering a percentage of that increase and it is not enough. Before the fuel price increased, we issued our first submission outlining how we needed help. We have gone past fuel subsidies long ago.

To save inshore fisheries, what is in our document needs to be implemented. This is not just from a financial aspect. There is also the aspect of reopening the closed fisheries. There has never been more bass in Irish waters before. They are eating the baby salmon - the smolts - as they come down the river. Bluefin tuna, which we are not allowed to catch, and seals, which are protected, are eating tens of thousands of large salmon. These fisheries need to be reopened to help us and then we would not need financial support. They were unjustifiably closed on us in the first place. The EU never told Ireland to do it. The eel fisheries in the estuaries got closed down. All the EU asked was for it to be regulated and Ireland's method of regulation was to ban it. The lads involved in those fisheries then entered pot fisheries and put more pressure on the shellfish stocks.

Before anglers, lobbyists and environmental groups got involved, we were completely sustainable. We fished everything seasonally and there were plenty of stocks there. Even in the seventies and eighties, there were thousands of boats, thousands more fishers and way more fish. As the fisheries were taken off us, followed by too much concentration on particular fisheries, everything went to hell.

Mr. Menarry might wish to come in.

The Deputy asked why BIM drew a line. It was for its own ease of doing things. It has the figures but has not released them. It has done economic surveys in the past three years. We need the information on the industry to come up with documents and such like. At a recent national inshore fisheries forum, NIFF, meeting, I asked where we were and I was told that BIM hoped to have the 2023 information out shortly. We are halfway through 2026 and we are hoping to get the 2023 information. When it comes to the catching sector, BIM is not fit for purpose.

BIM was introduced to develop the fishing industry and at some point it changed to the seafood industry. When it talks about seafood, it is talking about stuff that only saw the sea when it was flying across the Irish Sea before landing in Dublin Airport. We are competing against stuff called "seafood" that has never been in the sea. Just because a salmon smolt is put into a cage in salt water and fed like a sheep or a cow for 12 or 18 months, should that be called "seafood"? We have seen what the farmers have had to do to get organic status. It is time to come up with a way to distinguish between "seafood" and what is grown in the sea or even close to the sea. There are salmon on sale in Ireland that are totally farmed on land.

We have that side of things to contend with as well.

I thank the witnesses. I will say a few words at this juncture, before we go to the second round of questions and answers.

Many of the questions I had planned on asking have been put and well answered. For my part, I thank NIFA for the work it put into its initial proposal and this second proposal. The level of need of assistance that exists in the inshore sector is clear. It should be clear to anyone observing the proceedings of this committee the store we put in the inshore sector. Everyone in this room recognises the huge contribution the inshore sector makes to coastal communities, the maritime economy, the overall economy and keeping employment in marginal and peripheral communities around the coastline. For the Government to have allowed the decline that has already occurred borders on criminal. It is certainly an extreme form of neglect that has taken place. To allow what remains of the inshore sector to come under such pressure at this point is frankly unconscionable. That needed to be said and it needs to be heard.

I fully support the concept of a scheme to keep the industry alive in the difficult times it is experiencing at the moment. I note the comments the witnesses made about the existing fuel scheme. A criticism that others and I made when it was being broached and enacted in these Houses was that there would be issues with accessibility, it was not fit for purpose and it urgently needed to be looked at. With the agreement of members, the committee will write to BIM and the Minister to flag the concerns outlined today.

I will make a broader comment about the maritime and sea fisheries space, which warrants being raised in this forum. In recent days, the Taoiseach made a comment at a conference in Cork that there ought to be a full senior Minister at Cabinet for the marine and sea fisheries and I utterly agree. It is not often I agree with the Taoiseach, but I felt it was deeply disingenuous for the Head of Government to effectively flail his arms about and say someone somewhere should do something. That needed to be put on the record. It would be welcome, if the Taoiseach were so minded, for him to engage with the committee at some point in the future to discuss his proposal and whether it was made flippantly in the heat of the moment or he was genuinely considering it. It would be worthwhile for him to come before the committee to engage with us on that proposal and perhaps outline the reason, on the last few occasions when he could have appointed a senior Minister to that role, he chose not to do so. That needed to be said. I will leave it at that.

We will go to the second round of questions and answers. I will invite Deputies Mac Lochlainn and Whitmore and Senator Boyle in that order. We will have five-minute slots.

What is going on with the BIM portal? Will the witnesses give us some feedback on it? I am hearing feedback that it is cumbersome and bureaucratic. BIM spent a lot of money on these systems in recent years. I am mindful that some of the people who need support will be older and might not be as tech-savvy as a young person, so I want to get a sense of what the witnesses are hearing from their members about this. We are dealing with financial supports for fishers and there are some available.

Before the witnesses respond to that, there has been great support from the committee members and I think it would be in order at this point for the committee, if it is agreeable by members, to write to the Minister of State, Deputy Dooley, to convey that we had a hearing today and there was broad support for the principles put forward and to ask for his response to that.

Second, it has been stated here - this is quite a serious issue - that Michael Berkery's project which is recommending financial supports cannot conclude without the publication of the Kieran Mulvey report. We need to also ask the Minister for an update on that. The Minister had indicated it would be in the weeks ahead but we are now into June and approaching the recess in six weeks' time. The issue for me is that we need this Mulvey report published so that Michael Berkery can make his recommendations and get urgent support to fishermen, and then we also need his response to this. If that was agreeable with the members, I would ask that we would do it.

Are the two proposals that Deputy Mac Lochlainn has made there agreeable to members? Agreed.

All it leaves is the Bord Iascaigh Mhara portal. I want to get feedback from the NIFA. What are Mr. Menarry's members telling him about it?

That is all Avril, our secretary, is working on at the minute. From my own personal experience, it took me over three hours to upload 13 invoices on it.

As I stated previously, it is something we have highlighted. I met with the Minister of State before I came here. The Minister of State has promised to try to organise a meeting between ourselves and BIM tomorrow to try to sort out the fuel side of things but it is an ongoing issue. Everything now, going forward, will be done through the portal so we have told BIM what the issues are.

At one stage, over 40 of our members - over 10% of our organisation - did not have access to emails. There is a situation where we have members coming to Avril. She has to go to the very start. She has to set up an email for them because you cannot register without an email. Then she has to get all their information, download it, print it, etc. It is putting a massive workload on her but then it is getting uploaded on the BIM portal so it is fine. They will only see what is done. As was said previously with the people who did not apply for whatever reason, BIM said that they are inactive and asked why they would not have applied. We had a situation with the previous support scheme where to progress through the portal you had a choice of, "Do you have access to a laptop, a personal computer or a smartphone?" and you could not go on to the next page without clicking one of those. We had a lot of members who were going to sons, daughters or family members and they had to click that for them. Therefore, BIM says that everybody applied and had access to it and asks what the problem is. BIM is supposed to help the industry. On the CEO's comments, which we heard back through the Minister, that going back to paper was a backward step, if that is what is needed to help people, that is what has to be done.

On the seafood vision task force, the chairman always says that we should talk about the doables. If we have senior Department people saying it cannot be done, and then if the chairman is sitting there looking at our document and we are talking about all of these things, the real fear I have is that at the end of the report, he will say, "We looked at yours; it was not doable; thanks very much" and he will move on.

I will highlight a report that I got from Fishing News, a UK publication, that was published on 7 May. It mentions a report from the European Market Observatory for Fisheries and Aquaculture Products, which states:

A return to pre-2020 conditions is unlikely. Instead, the sector is moving into a new normal, where resilience, sustainability, and diversification are no longer just responses to crises, but key factors for long-term competitiveness and supply security.

That is a report at EU level talking about a lot of the issues we have raised in our document. I would be hopeful if our Minister goes to Europe with that and with our document. If they recognise the issues at EU level, I do not see why funding cannot be got. The ask needs to be made. We cannot have a situation where the Minister says that it is not going to happen and there is no point. Ask and get a reply.

There is an urgency with this. The deadline for the scheme is this Friday, 12 June.

I have just got a message from someone listening in. This person has said that they are fully tax compliant and have an accountant, but that they pay for the fuel by cash locally. It is not possible to show the fuel has been paid for using a card, so this means this person will not be eligible for the scheme. That is just one wee story.

I am concerned about inshore fishermen and fisherwomen and families who are not members of NIFA and do not have the brilliant administrative support it is providing. It is a huge amount of work. What are those people going to do? Perhaps it is in order for us to call for this scheme to be extended to try to address these issues urgently.

I was going to make a suggestion-----

I would like to come in here. I agree with the Deputy. We have asked for an extension and my understanding is that it is going to be given. Regarding the portal, I would not regard myself as being overly stupid, but I am incapable of using it. I have to get Avril to do everything for me. If we look at the number of inshore boats on the fleet register and the number that apply for grants, roughly less than 50% actually go for them. I think that tells its own story, really.

The Berkery and Mulvey reports were mentioned. Could the committee please also ask for the mackerel report commissioned by the former Minister, Deputy Charlie McConalogue, three years ago and paid for by BIM two and a half years ago, to be published as well? We know the findings, namely that 400 tonnes is not sufficient for inshore. The report, for some reason, is being finalised for two and a half years.

I thank Mr. Desmond. On Deputy Mac Lochlainn’s suggestions, in response, if it is agreed by the committee, I would say we will make that call on foot of all the evidence we have heard today about that scheme. I refer to the deadline being extended from Friday. Additionally, I note there will be a private meeting of the select committee to review Estimates with the Minister of State, Deputy Dooley, tomorrow evening. I will be prepared to make some time in that meeting for us to raise these points again directly with the Minister of State. On foot of his engagement with NIFA this morning and our correspondence, I am sure he will be willing to engage with us. I think those two things could allow us some space to do it. I should add that the meeting of the select committee will be in public and broadcast, which means members will be able to see it.

I will give one point of information that might be of help. When the scheme opened first, one of the criteria was a requirement to have purchased fuel from an Irish supplier. Subsequently, that has been changed for the benefit of the larger vessels that may have bought their fuel outside of the country, for whatever reason. The Minister of State has changed things for others, so I do not see why he cannot do it for those who need it most.

That is an important point. Turning to some housekeeping, the proposal from Deputy Mac Lochlainn related to the two reports. It is agreed to take on board the suggestion from Mr. Desmond to include the third report? Agreed. That is just to keep everything formal and shipshape. I call Deputy Whitmore.

Following on from Deputy Mac Lochlainn, Mr. Menarry said the Commissioner said it would be possible to have a scheme funded through the EU.

When we met the Commissioner at the end of January, we asked if it would be possible for European Maritime, Fisheries and Aquaculture Fund, EMFAF, funding to be used for crisis supports. He said that, basically, all it would take would be for Ireland to ask, and that is possible. We raised this matter with the seafood task force and we were told by an official that the Commissioner does not know what he is talking about.

Okay. Mr. Menarry and Mr. Desmond did not receive anything in writing from the Commissioner. That was just said in a meeting.

No. That was just said.

To follow on from what we have agreed in relation to the Minister of State, I think it would be worthwhile if the committee wrote to the Commissioner to tell him this was raised as part of our discussions. It will be important that we have that advice from the Commissioner so we can tell the Department or the Minister of State that this is possible, we have received confirmation and, therefore, ask them if they can work within that boundary.

I would just sort of add to-----

Other member states have fisheries where the vessels fish for six months and then tie up for six months and receive payments on the grounds that it protects the stocks, etc. That is how they get their payments.

Which countries do that?

I believe that is Portugal.

Okay, perfect. I thank Mr. Menarry.

Going back to the Cathaoirleach's points on the Taoiseach, a dedicated Minister for the marine needs to be at the Cabinet table. This is something I have been pushing for, even since before I came here. With all that is going on in the marine, it is something that really needs to be done. We need to have a voice at the table.

I have a couple of quick things. We talked about the Commissioner, whom I have met on two or three occasions. When you chat to him, he says that these schemes are available and to just apply. However, when you come back, every door is closed in your face. Is that what NIFA is saying here?

People will not ask, or they are told there is no point. You can ask the question and get the answer. It seems that the inshore sector is too much bother.

The couple of times I met the Commissioner on different matters, he said there were schemes available to us and that we could try this or that. However, when you come back here to Ireland, none of that is available and you are asked who told you that. There is a real breakdown in what is going on here.

Meeting with the Commissioner face to face last week, the stories he has been told about the situation in Ireland are a bit different to what our story is. Even with regard to representation of the inshore sector, he said that we had the regional advisory councils, and our closest one is the North Western Waters Advisory Council. He suggested that this would be a good place for NIFA, as a producer organisation, to give a voice to the inshore sector. Six producer organisations from Ireland are on the North Western Waters Advisory Council, but the four producer organisations that got onto its last inshore sector subcommittee were the four offshore producer organisations. The two dedicated inshore producer organisations did not get onto it.

There is a real breakdown here.

Mr. Menarry talked about the fish coming into the country. I talked to a couple of people who are importing because they have to. It is not the weather they are worried about, but what time the aeroplane is going to land in Dublin or Belfast and how long until they get their product down the road. It is criminal what is going on. People have to import fish from other countries and take it in here because we cannot catch our own.

I hate to interrupt, but just on that point, it is not that we cannot catch our own. We landed €76 million worth of prawns - what we call langoustines or Dublin Bay prawns - last year in Ireland, and I believe that €74 million worth was exported. The Senator knows my boat in Killybegs. Within 48 hours of leaving my boat, crabs can be in Hong Kong and the rest of China. We produce world class seafood that goes all around the world.

I made the comparison at a seafood and food conference a few months ago that what was going on in the seafood sector was the same as Irish farmers exporting Irish beef to Brazil and importing exclusively Brazilian beef into Ireland. That is what we are doing with the seafood in this country; we do not have a shortage of seafood in the country. We have the best seafood in the world - it is world class and wanted around the world - but what is being promoted and sold in the country is not seafood in my opinion.

I will just take up a point that Mr. Desmond made about bass and tuna. There is pollock, too. Is there something we can do in this committee to put pressure on the Minister and Department to reopen this? From what I hear, we did not even apply for a tuna quota again this year. I know from the smaller inshore fishers up my way that if there are one or two tuna in the year, it would be great to have one or two tags. It would help pay for the diesel and the crew. The price of bait at the minute is also a big problem.

Exactly.

It is more than just the bluefin. There is no person under the age of 20 in Ireland who has tasted a wild salmon. I think that is criminal. There are tens of thousands of seals eating them no problem. The bass stocks are healthy and higher than they have ever been, even when we were allowed to fish them, and they are eating all the smolts. If you open the stomach of a bass after a salmon run, you will see its belly full of baby salmon.

On these fisheries, there could even be pilot schemes first. I agree 100% on the bluefin tuna, but we are already kind of under way with that. We are working with the International Commission for the Conversation of Atlantic Tunas, ICCAT, and trying to get a scientific fishery, but that has to be done through Europe. It was the Irish Government closed the bass and salmon fisheries. The EU never asked it to close them. A couple of pilot schemes could be opened where a few licences would be given to a few boats, just to see what the story with the stocks was. The salmon do seem to be at sea, yet Inland Fisheries Ireland, IFI, does not seem to be getting them through the counters on the rivers, for whatever reason. Bass is one fishery that could be reopened tomorrow morning and it would take huge pressure off the shellfish stocks. The Marine Institute will tell us that the stocks are at a sustainable level. The Dutch have asked for a 94% increase in the take-up of bass in European waters. We are looking out our windows at British and French pair trawlers fishing for them and we cannot ourselves. What is happening is criminal. On bluefin, my understanding is that we did not even send someone to the ICCAT meeting for bluefin this past year.

I have no question, just a proposal. I thank NIFA for coming in and giving us the document. It is something we can work on. Senator Boyle said something about the EU Commissioner. We will have the Minister in, but we could also ask for the Commissioner to come to this committee the next time he visits Ireland so that we could put some of these questions. As Senator Boyle says, when anybody is out in Europe, they are told it is a matter for here, and then they come back. I propose that the next time the Commissioner is in Ireland, we ask him to come to this committee. If he is here on a day when the committee does not normally sit, we will arrange a committee meeting to suit the Commissioner's diary.

It is a very sensible proposal. We discussed this before the substantive part of the meeting. The Commissioner will be in Ireland on 7 and 8 July to attend a conference in Wexford on the EU oceans Act. We are already engaged with the Commissioner's office to see if it is possible that we would have some kind of engagement, be it here or in Wexford.

I was going to add that if the Commissioner could not come to Dublin, we would go to Wexford to meet him. I make that proposal.

We will send the correspondence that Deputy Whitmore has suggested as well. We will continue that engagement because it is really important. In my own experience, I have found that often sensible and necessary proposals fall between two stools with a Department in Dublin saying it cannot do something because the European Union will not let it and the Commission saying it does not know what the problem is because it has never been asked. It is important that we look under the cover and see exactly who is saying what, what is permissible, what is not permissible and what needs to change so that we can have some level of support.

We are looking at payments going forward. I looked at a picture last night - Mr. Menarry will be able to relate to this - of Burtonport, dated 1989, and there were 36 trawlers there. I was driving past last week and there is not one. There are very few small boats. In my home on Árainn Mhór island, Muireann Kavanagh and her dad are fishing out of Aphort pier where my own father fished out of. That is it.

What is happening is that the culture in fishing communities is eroding. If we did not have Mr. Menarry and Mr. Desmond pushing forward on this and trying to sustain this, where would this be? We can see it is slowly dying. We cannot get the younger people coming up to move in. I want the opinion of the witnesses. It is very important to have on record the cultural impacts of what happens when fishing communities are not supported.

I thank the Deputy. As Mr. Menarry is closer to there, I will let him take the majority of the answer but I wish to disagree with one thing the Deputy said. It is not slowly dying anymore; it is rapidly dying this past year. That is all I can say. Mr. Menarry would be closer to the Deputy's neck of the woods.

Yes. It is like the analogy I gave earlier. If you do not keep up the maintenance on your car and if you neglect it, eventually it is going to go bang. The inshore sector has been totally and utterly neglected by previous Ministers and by the organisations that are supposed to be there to develop and help us. It is only going back to the Irish Inshore Fisheries Sector Strategy 2019-2023. When Mr. Desmond asked the then Minister, Deputy McConalogue, about it, he got a very narky answer asking what that had to do with him. He was in the brief after the then Minister, Deputy Creed. There were a few Ministers in between them for a short time but he was the next Minister in line. It was his Department's strategy that was given to BIM to implement where nothing happened. Covid was the great excuse. We got to 2023 and we asked then what was happening. We were told it was to be redrafted and they would go again. As I said, we are in 2026 where BIM is looking at 2023 information. We will be in 2027 by the time that comes out. We have had situations with quotas and access to polyvalent mackerel. We lost our access to that. At a ministerial stroke of a pen, it was gone. We had the north-west herring, which would have been a big thing for Burtonport. It collapsed. The North RIFF and NIFA made a request to the then Minister, Deputy McConalogue, to redraft the policy behind that because we feared when the fishery reopened, déjà vu, the fishery would be fished the way it was before. We are possibly looking at a collapse of that fishery again. Some 1,500 tonnes of it went uncaught last year. The fish were there in certain areas. The big boats could not get it but the wee boats were not allowed to catch it. I saw something lately that if we were 1 kg under the line, the fishery would be closed again three years after opening but 1 kg over and we will have a quota of 4,000 tonnes. Looking at the Marine Institute line, I made the comment that it will have to extend the page because it is only going down. That is another fishery closed again, and not by overfishing by the inshore sector.

I ask the committee to ask one question in relation to bass. Bass fishing was closed in Ireland for conservation measures. At some point somebody said it had to be closed. Will the committee ask where that line was at the time and where the stocks are now? If it fell below a certain level that it needed protection, that is fine, but where are we are now in relation to that line? We have been told the Marine Institute has the information but it is not its remit to make recommendations to the Department; it only acts on requests from the Department. If the Department does not ask, the institute cannot say. Can this committee ask that of the Marine Institute?

I am sure we can.

That would be great.

That is something on which we can definitely engage with the Marine Institute and we can feed that back. We will write to it.

That brings to an end our question and answer session and our meeting. As I said in my own comments, I am personally deeply grateful for the work the association is doing. This committee is grateful for its representatives' appearance here again to discuss the reality that is facing the inshore fishery sector and their proposal for some measures that would allow the industry to sustain itself for the next number of years and, we hope, into the future. We have had a really good discussion, I think.

We have some actions that we as a committee are going to take. We will not leave this alone. Let me assure the witnesses of that. There are no further matters for discussion. I remind members that the select committee will meet tomorrow at 6 p.m.