The Irish fishing industry is up in arms over news that Minister for Marine Charlie McConalogue declined to take up an offer of 3000 tonnes of mackerel for two years, which could have been worth close to €10 million to the country’s pelagic sector.
The news was broken following an investigation by The Skipper, which has a letter from Denmark’s then-Minister of Fisheries Jacob Jensen, making the offer as an effort to reach a solution to a longstanding dispute over post-Brexi access to mackerel fisheries.
The dispute is part of the Brexit fallout and the loss of access to UK waters, with Ireland hardest hit as EU quotas for mackerel and langoustine were handed back to Britain, and with consequent negative effects for the EU-Norway deal on migratory stocks – primarily mackerel.
Denmark pushed the EU in 2021 for a historical mackerel quota, to make up for the quota its fleet had formerly caught in Norwegian waters, which would have been at the expense of Ireland and other member states. Officials in Ireland were aware of the Danish move, and there has since been an ongoing row – which Jacob Jensen appears to have attempted to defuse with the offer of a transfer of mackerel to Ireland a couple of months prior to the December Council.
No mention was made to Irish fisheries organisations of the Danish offer, which would have been separate from Ireland’s annual quota decided in Brussels.
Industry leaders in Ireland state that they were ‘hoodwinked’, and have expressed their shock at the Minister’s decision, without consultation, to decline the Danish offer.
