The sorry tale of one mighty trawler and a Green party that clearly doesn’t give a damn about the environment.

By Max McGuinness

Fianna Fáil has long practised a strange mixture of indolent largesse and pip-squeaking miserliness. Want to drill for oil and gas off County Mayo? Go ahead. How much? Ah no, sher, what’s a couple of billion in natural resources between friends? Just buy me a pint sometime.

Want to send your autistic child to school? Well now, let’s see, that’s going to be awfully expensive I’m afraid. There’s plenty of good private schools doing that sort of thing you know? And I wouldn’t try suing us if I were you because we’ll bankrupt you and take your house. Got to get the best deal for the people of Ireland, after all.

Want to buy the world’s biggest trawler and deplete the fish stocks of a few west African countries? The lads in Brussels won’t be too happy about that. Ah, you might put a good word in for us, Bertie. Aw, well, okay, there’s a couple of million worth of tonnage allocations from your old trawler for yourself. I may be after a few fillets of mackerel next Thursday though, wha’?

This is (roughly) what happened eight years ago when Donegal fisherman Kevin McHugh took delivery of the Atlantic Dawn, a 144-metre-long factory trawler weighing a whopping 14,055 tonnes. The only problem was that killjoy eurocrats had decided that the Irish were already getting more than their fair share of fish and that no more Irish vessels could be added to the fleet register.

Faced with the prospect of losing tens of millions because of an arrogant, irresponsible, and environmentally destructive investment, McHugh did what any of us would have done: he went to see the Taoiseach. Bertie happily agreed to use his pull in Brussels to have the Atlantic Dawn added to the Irish register. Lo and behold, the Irish tonnage allocation was magically increased by precisely 14,055 tonnes. As a sweetener to an already diabetes-threatening deal, McHugh was allowed to keep the tonnage allocation from his old trawlers, which he then sold at lavish rates to smaller (and less well connected) fry in the Irish fleet.
McHugh died suddenly of CJD in 2006 but a deal struck by his heirs in February is a case of déjà vu. Having sold the Atlantic Dawn itself last year, Atlantic Dawn Ltd. now fully or partly owns three trawlers and is about to become co-owner of the Johanna Maria, which, at 119 metres in length, comes close to the Atlantic Dawn’s seabed-scraping capacities. Despite the Minister of State for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, John Browne’s insistence last year that tonnage allowances are “a national asset,” not owned by the fishermen themselves, McHugh’s old company will be able to flag the Johanna Maria in Ireland without paying a penny to the exchequer, using the tonnage allowance gifted to them for the Atlantic Dawn.

Their new vessel will be sent to trawl waters off the west African country of Mauritania where Atlantic Dawn used to fish under an opaque, private deal with the corrupt dictator Maaouya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya until he was ousted in a coup d’état in 2005. The new government proved less malleable towards what locals called “the Ship from Hell” and expelled the Atlantic Dawn from Mauritanian waters in late-2005.

The incident sums up this government’s three guiding principles: incompetence, selfish provincialism and the impunity of wealth. No one in power seems to have bothered to protect the “national asset” of Irish tonnage allowances by insisting that Atlantic Dawn Ltd. cede its allowance as soon as it sold its trawler. No one in power ever spared a thought for the African fishermen whose wooden canoes and handheld nets are no match for an industrial super-trawler capable of catching up to 7,000 tonnes of fish in one trip out to sea, let alone for the aquatic environment which cannot possibly sustain fishing on this scale. And no one in power ever objected to the Taoiseach acting as messenger boy for one irresponsible businessman when his interests were threatened.

Quite apart from the case in question here, the government continues to subsidise a fishing industry in which illegal overfishing is common – no one has yet been sent to jail for this environmental crime – and which has no long-term economic future in its present form.

One would expect the Green Party to be more indignant. In opposition, Eamon Ryan was outspoken in his criticism of fisheries policy and the government’s refusal to acknowledge the scale of the problem of illegal fishing. But he has publicly ignored the issue since his appointment as Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources – a Department which lost responsibility for the Marine at the same time. If the Greens don’t want to be seen as mudguards instead of muckrakers, they need to start speaking up.