Inshore sector “rapidly dying” as committee backs NIFA stabilisation and climate scheme

The National Inshore Fishermen’s Association tells the Joint Committee on Fisheries and Maritime Affairs that years of neglect, a worsening weather crisis and a broken fuel-scheme portal have pushed inshore fishermen to breaking point.

The inshore fishing sector is “rapidly dying” and faces irreversible collapse without urgent State support, the Joint Committee on Fisheries and Maritime Affairs heard on Tuesday, 9 June, as members lined up behind a National Inshore Fishermen’s Association (NIFA) proposal for an income stabilisation and climate compensation scheme. The resumed hearing, chaired by Deputy Conor D. McGuinness, took evidence from NIFA chairperson Michael Desmond, who joined online, and vice chairperson John Menarry, who appeared in the committee room.

The association’s revised submission, “A Deliverable Framework for Inshore Fisheries Stabilisation and Climate Adaptation”, sets out what Mr Desmond called a “structured, practical, and policy-aligned approach” to a sector whose fortunes have fallen sharply since the 2019 to 2023 inshore strategy. The framework rests on three measures: a multi-annual inshore sustainability and resilience scheme to stabilise incomes; a weather and safety assurance payment to cover climate-driven loss of fishing days; and a voluntary public goods and sustainability scheme to reward environmental work, alongside actions on bait security, diversification and market resilience.

Mr Desmond said the sector was contending with “rising operational costs, climate-driven loss of fishing days, market instability and resource constraints”. He framed the case in plain terms. “Ireland’s inshore fishermen are primary food producers, operating in uniquely challenging economic and environmental conditions,” he said. “The sector urgently needs financial support to secure its future.” Without it, he warned, “the sector will continue to deteriorate, with a detrimental, irreversible impact on rural coastal communities”.

A worsening weather crisis

Weather dominated the early exchanges. Asked by Senator Manus Boyle how many days were lost each year, Mr Desmond replied: “We estimate it to be 100 days, but in my lifetime of fishing, I have never seen anything like the past year.” He told the committee the situation was no abstraction. “We are in the second week of June and I have not been out in the past eight days due to bad weather,” he said, noting three days of gale-force winds in the previous week.

In the first 100 days of 2026, he said, 90 recorded a swell above two metres, the point beyond which small open boats cannot safely put to sea. “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,” he said. The proposed weather and safety assurance payment would draw on Met Éireann swell data and be calculated at the minimum wage of €14.10 over a ten-hour day for each day lost. Senator Boyle said he had heard “the exact same” from fishermen off Donegal, where pot men and others could not get out.

‘Neither smart nor simple’

Much of the session turned to the difficulty fishermen face drawing down the existing fuel support scheme through Bord Iascaigh Mhara’s online portal. Mr Menarry, who met Minister of State Deputy Dooley before the hearing, was scathing about the system portal, SmartSimple. “That is good old Irish sarcasm because it is neither smart nor simple,” he said. “Anybody I have talked to, from my accountant to agricultural advisers and others, say they have seen nothing like it for difficulty.” He added that it had taken him “over three hours to upload 13 invoices”, with applicants forced to enter the same details twice.

Asked directly by Deputy Charles Ward whether the system had been “designed to fail”, Mr Menarry said the issue had been raised with BIM repeatedly over “three or four years”, and that each new generation of the portal was simply “worse”. Around 900 of a fleet of roughly 1,700 vessels applied under previous schemes, a figure he put down to complexity rather than disinterest. More than 40 NIFA members, over 10 per cent of the organisation, have no email access, leaving the association’s secretary to register them one by one.

Mr Desmond was equally blunt. “I would not regard myself as being overly stupid, but I am incapable of using it,” he said. He contrasted the process with Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland home-energy grants, which applicants can “go through that process in seconds”, arguing that where the State does not want uptake, “the grant application becomes extremely difficult and people give up”. The committee agreed to write to BIM and the Minister of State; Mr Menarry said a meeting between NIFA and BIM had been promised, though he doubted “one day will fix that”.

‘It is discrimination really’

Both witnesses attacked the flat rate paid to smaller vessels. Mr Desmond, a full-time fisherman, receives €350 regardless of his activity, and pointed out that a part-time operator with a slightly larger 8.2 metre boat could draw down more. “Our value to coastal communities should not be decided by the length of our vessels,” he said. “An awful lot of us in the smaller vessels are full time… It is discrimination really.” Mr Menarry added that smaller operators buying fuel at the pump could be paying 30 to 40 cent a litre more than larger vessels purchasing in bulk, and that the size-based approach penalised those hit hardest.

The state aid impasse

The central obstacle to funding, the committee heard, is the State’s reading of EU state aid rules. NIFA had met European Commissioner Costas Kadis, who the witnesses said indicated support could be granted in exceptional circumstances once Ireland asked in writing. “There is absolutely no reason state aid rules will not be relaxed in exceptional circumstances,” Mr Desmond said. “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.” He left members to draw their own conclusions.

Mr Menarry was more pointed. “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,” he said. “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.” He told the committee that when NIFA relayed the Commissioner’s position to the seafood task force, a Department of the marine official said the Commissioner “did not know what he was talking about”.

Deputy Pádraig Mac Lochlainn, who commended NIFA on its second submission, said dispensations from state aid rules were plainly available during a crisis, pointing to precedents linked to Ukraine and the Middle East. He recalled that when he first toured the piers of his native Inishowen, inshore fishermen “repeatedly told me wherever I went that they just wanted to fish”. That the association was now seeking support, he said, was “a clear signal of how serious things have got”.

Reports gathering dust

Frustration centred on a series of unpublished reports. NIFA said the Michael Berkery seafood task force could not conclude without the Kieran Mulvey report, which it understood the Department, BIM and the Minister had held for months. Mr Desmond also pressed for release of a mackerel report commissioned three years ago and paid for by BIM two and a half years ago, the findings of which, he said, would confirm that “400 tonnes is not sufficient for inshore”. With the recess approaching, the committee agreed to seek urgent updates on all three reports and to write to the Minister of State conveying its broad support for the proposal.

Seven jobs ashore

Setting out the sector’s economic weight, Mr Menarry said the headline figures understated its reach. “For every job at sea we are talking about at least seven jobs ashore,” he said, a ratio he put at 15 in south-west England. He warned of a tipping point at which the loss of the inshore fleet would also drain crew from the offshore sector, where his own son had started. “The whole industry will collapse if we lose the inshore sector,” he said. “It is the largest sector of the industry.”

He drew a sharp comparison on imports, noting Ireland landed €76 million of langoustines last year and exported some €74 million of them, while fish flown in through Dublin was passed off as local. He likened it to “Irish farmers exporting Irish beef to Brazil and importing exclusively Brazilian beef into Ireland”. Irish produce, he insisted, was world class: “We have the best seafood in the world… but what is being promoted and sold in the country is not seafood in my opinion.” His own crabs, he said, could be “in Hong Kong and the rest of China” within 48 hours of leaving the boat in Killybegs.

A culture eroding

The cultural cost was raised by Deputy Charles Ward, who described a 1989 photograph of Burtonport showing 36 trawlers where, driving past last week, “there is not one”. He asked the witnesses to put the human impact on the record. Mr Desmond corrected a single word of the question. “It is not slowly dying anymore; it is rapidly dying this past year,” he said. He warned the most peripheral coastal areas would “become absolute ghost towns” without action, and rejected the suggestion that the future lay in tourism and offshore wind. “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,” he said.

Mr Menarry traced a decade of neglect, from the unfulfilled 2019 strategy through Covid-era licence buy-backs, Brexit, the Ukraine war and now the Iran conflict. “We have offered solutions, but we have been totally ignored,” he said, likening the sector to a neglected car: skip the maintenance and “eventually it is going to go bang”, with repair costing far more than upkeep would have.

Reopen the closed fisheries

The witnesses argued that reopening fisheries closed by the Irish Government, rather than by Brussels, would reduce the need for subsidy. Mr Desmond said bass stocks were at record highs and were predating salmon smolts. “There is no person under the age of 20 in Ireland who has tasted a wild salmon. I think that is criminal,” he said. Bass “could be reopened tomorrow morning and it would take huge pressure off the shellfish stocks”, he argued, while Irish boats watched British and French pair trawlers fish for them. “What is happening is criminal.” Mr Menarry asked the committee to establish from the Marine Institute where bass stocks now stood against the conservation threshold that triggered closure. The committee agreed to write to the institute.

Support from members was unanimous. Deputy Michael Cahill said coastal communities were “on their knees right around the Irish coastline” and welcomed the Government’s commitment of up to €15 million to vessel owners, backing the proposed payment of €20,000 per eligible vessel over three years. Deputy Jennifer Whitmore said she could “hear the frustration” in the witnesses’ voices and urged that any scheme be framed to satisfy EU approval; the committee agreed to write to Commissioner Kadis to seek his advice in writing.

In closing, Mr McGuinness said the State’s tolerance of the decline “borders on criminal” and was “frankly unconscionable”. He backed the Taoiseach’s recent call, made at a conference in Cork, for a senior Cabinet Minister for the marine, but said it was “deeply disingenuous” of the Head of Government to “flail his arms about and say someone somewhere should do something”, and invited the Taoiseach to come before the committee. Members will seek to meet Commissioner Kadis during his 7 and 8 July visit to Ireland for a conference in Wexford on the EU Oceans Act.