Irish And UK Commercial Fishermen Left in The Dark As 140-Mile Live-Fire Zone Closes Off Rockall Grounds

Irish and Scottish commercial fishermen ⁠​​​​​​​‌‌‌​​​‌‌​‌‌​‌​‌​​‌‌​‌‌​‌​‌‌‌⁠working the Rockall grounds this week have reacted with anger and frustration after learning, only days beforehand, that a 140-nautical-mile stretch of Atlantic water around Rockall will be closed to them from tomorrow for a major UK-US military exercise.

Skippers and their representative bodies argue the exercise could have been sited away from grounds fleets have relied on for generations. French and Spanish gill-netters are also active in the area at this time of year, with Japanese and South Korean bluefin tuna vessels working nearby.

What is Atlantic Thunder 26?

The exercise, Atlantic Thunder 26 (AT26), is a joint Royal Navy and US Navy live-fire exercise running daily from 17 to 21 September. Its centrepiece is the sinking of the decommissioned US frigate USS Klakring, which will be targeted with missiles and bombs in a coordinated live-fire demonstration. The hulk is expected to settle in water deeper than 1,900 metres, far beyond the reach of trawl gear, so the wreck itself is not expected to become a hazard to the fishing grounds. The real hazard is the week of live firing beforehand: a danger zone spanning 140 nautical miles, centred close enough to Rockall that the islet and its surrounding banks fall well inside it, not merely near its edge.

Who issued the warning

QinetiQ operates the MOD Hebrides Range on behalf of the Ministry of Defence under a Long Term Partnering Agreement (LTPA), a contract covering weapons testing and training support services across 16 UK defence ranges. The Hebrides Range’s danger area can be extended well beyond its home waters off South Uist and Benbecula for specific trials, which is why QinetiQ, rather than the Royal Navy directly, was the party responsible for drafting and submitting the navigational warning covering this week’s Rockall danger zone. It submitted that warning to the UK Hydrographic Office (UKHO), the body that actually issues NAVAREA warnings, which in turn passed it to the Coastguard and for broadcast via NAVTEX. That official channel, QinetiQ confirmed, is the legal requirement it is mandated to meet.

Equipment was never the problem

Vessels working grounds this remote are, in practice, all Class I vessels of 24 metres or more, the size the distances and weather off Rockall demand. Under Irish law, any fishing vessel of 12 metres or more is legally required to carry a NAVTEX receiver, a threshold the UK reaches only at 24 metres for new vessels and 45 metres for older ones. NAVAREA warnings, the category this one falls under, cannot be filtered out by the receiver under international rules, so any boat with a working set, switched on and in range, could not have missed it outright. What was missing was anything to mark this particular warning, among the dozens issued for the wider North Atlantic that week, as the one that mattered most to a fleet bound for Rockall.

No warning reached the fleet

Beyond that broadcast, commercial fishermen ⁠​​​​​​​‌‌‌​​​‌‌​‌‌​‌​‌​​‌‌​‌‌​‌​‌‌‌⁠and their representative bodies say nothing reached them through any fisheries-specific channel, national or European. The Scottish Fishermen’s Federation confirmed to The Skipper that it received a single email four days before the exercise began, in which the Rockall warning appeared alongside a longer briefing on other firing exercises off Scotland’s west coast. One Donegal skipper, freshly back from a trip, told The Skipper that warnings for comparable offshore exercises near St Kilda would normally reach his boat through his local fishermen’s co-op, but nothing of the kind arrived this time.

One Irish industry representative put the question directly to the European Commission and to the Irish Department of Transport. The Commission’s fisheries department, DG MARE, said this type of notification is not covered under the fisheries chapter of the UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement, and that it had never received one, adding that it assumed a formal exchange existed between coastal states but suggesting the representative check with the defence forces instead. The Department of Transport, which issues Ireland’s own Marine Notices, confirmed it had not been made aware of the exercise either, but said the notification requirement “would appear to be satisfied” by the existence of the NAVAREA warning alone.

A familiar fight

It is not the first time Ireland’s fishing industry has had to raise the alarm over a live-fire exercise on its doorstep. In January 2022, The Skipper first alerted the Irish South & West Fish Producers Organisation to Russia’s plan to hold live-fire exercises inside Ireland’s EEZ, off the south-west coast. The resulting public pressure, including direct diplomatic intervention by the then Tánaiste, led Russia to relocate the exercise outside Irish waters within days. That was a foreign adversary responding to Irish pressure over a threat to fishing grounds. This time the exercise involves close allies, on a rock whose sovereignty Ireland has never accepted as British, nor, in fairness, ever formally claimed as its own, and yet no state body on either side of the Irish Sea stepped forward to warn the fleet directly.

How to get on the update list

Beyond that legal requirement, the only other notification anyone received was QinetiQ’s own opt-in email update to commercial fishermen and other interested parties, a courtesy, not a legal requirement, in which the Rockall warning appeared in a longer briefing on upcoming firing exercises off Scotland’s west coast. QinetiQ said it is happy to add any commercial fishermen or vessels working the affected grounds to its update list. Commercial fishermen can register interest with John Sutherland, Trials Conducting Officer, at jasutherland@qinetiq.com.

A gap nobody owns

What this exercise has exposed is not a single failure but a gap nobody owns. The legal requirement is met by a broadcast most working skippers have no practical reason to be parsing for a 140-mile hazard zone; the fisheries-specific safety net, such as it is, rests entirely on the goodwill of a private contractor. The Skipper is calling for that gap to be closed: a formal, fisheries-specific notification system, coordinated between the UKHO, the Irish Department of Transport and industry representative bodies, so that no fleet is ever again left to find out about a 140-mile danger zone in the middle of its own grounds from a footnote in someone else’s email.