The Chairman of the first Oireachtas Committee on Fisheries and the Marine says it has a wide remit and he will use it fully to benefit the fishing industry and the maritime sector as widely as possible. Conor D.McGuinness is a first-time T.D., who has been appointed Chairman and sees it as having a “strategic role” for the maritime sphere. He is Sinn Fein Deputy for Waterford and comes from a fishing family.
“It has a broad remit. It is a really positive step that there is now a committee that is looking at fishing and it is also looking at maritime affairs and I’m taking a broad view on that.My image for fishing is an industry that is supported, that is valued by government, by the State. In my analysis that has never happened by the State and I see this Committee as providing an opportunity to hold government to account, to hold the Department to account,” he told me in this month’s Podcast which you can hear in full on the Seascapes website. “There is now a Junior Minister with specific responsibility for fisheries, that is something that wasn’t there in the last government, wasn’t in previous governments, to hold that Minister and the senior Minister to account and also to make very practical suggestions, solutions-focused about how we can better support fishing, particularly inshore fisheries, but the whole sector, the whole seafood sector as well, including support for producers onshore to add value to what is caught in our waters and also taking a good, long, hard look at how sea fisheries protection operates in Ireland.”
“That is an issue which has often come up in recent times,” I said to him. “Yes,” he replied. “There is certainly a feeling within coastal communities that fisheries protection is heavily geared towards policing Irish-flagged vessels and smaller vessels while perhaps being less inclined to board foreign-flagged vessels and larger vessels fishing in our waters. That is another thing I will be very keen to examine.”
