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ANOTHER YEAR, ANOTHER meeting of prime ministers and presidents puffing themselves up as leaders in the fight for a habitable planet.
Next week, to coincide with World Ocean Day, Taoiseach Micheál Martin is expected to travel to Nice, France, for the United Nations Ocean Conference, billed as a meeting to “conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas, and marine resources for sustainable development”. This event is probably better understood if the words ‘conserve’ and ‘sustainable’ are simply removed.
Taoiseach Martin will travel to France nearly three years to the day from his speech to the National Biodiversity Conference in Dublin Castle where he called “for a new era of stewardship of our natural world”, lamenting that the warnings of activists and scientists have “not always been heeded” but promising that, finally, “the message is being heard”. I was in the room at the time, and his words were warmly received. Some may even have believed them.
There was some reason to think the Taoiseach was genuine. In 2022, the Green Party held key positions in government, and popular opinion was behind them. His speech was supported by a decent Programme for Government that promised great things for the seas around Ireland, including the passing of legislation for Marine Protected Areas (MPAs), the protection of inshore waters from harmful trawling and the full implementation of sustainability measures in the EU’s Common Fisheries Policy (CFP), in particular an end to overfishing and an end to the dumping of unwanted catches (also known as discarding).
None of these things have happened, all, while the seas around Ireland continue to be hollowed out by industrial and poorly regulated fishing, climate change and even pollution from agriculture, plastic and untreated sewage.
First, the MPAs. Nearly a decade after legislation for MPAs was first promised, and two and a half years since a first draft was first published, there is still no sign of it. The Taoiseach will no doubt reiterate at Nice how Ireland is committed to protecting 30% of our waters in MPAs by 2030, but the window for this is fast shrinking. Without the basic legislation in place, the process of identifying where the MPAs should go and deciding how they will be managed for people and wildlife cannot even begin.
Fianna Fáil’s Timmy Dooley, the minister of state now responsible for the MPA legislation, insisted on radio recently that it was a “real priority”, but the lack of progress does not support this.
Meanwhile, an early test of Micheál Martin’s commitment fell flat when the Irish government dismissed proposals from the European Commission in 2023 to remove bottom trawling and dredging, among the most destructive forms of fishing, from existing Special Areas of Conservation around our coast.
In May, following a challenge from a German fishing group, the General Court of the EU found that protected areas must, in fact, be protected from bottom trawling and other harmful activities. These areas have been designated for years, but national governments, including Ireland’s, seem determined to prevent any measures that would provide real protection.
A separate legal battle over the safeguarding of inshore waters from trawling also shows no sign of a resolution. Recently, even the minister for nature, Fianna Fáil’s Christopher O’Sullivan, took to Instagram to decry the damage being done by trawling for sprats (a small fish that is the basis for much of the marine food chain), with respect, he was seemingly oblivious to the fact that he is in the government that has done nothing about it during their years in power.
Finally, there is the larger issue of industrial fishing in the shared waters of the EU, which is managed under the CFP. Since Brexit, negotiations about fishing quotas are less between individual governments and more between the EU and the UK, Norway and Iceland. The CFP has been a disaster for ocean biodiversity, and despite a hopeful reform in 2013, which promised an end to overfishing and discarding, these practices continue.
The latest fiasco is mackerel, among the most valuable and once the most abundant of fish, which is heading for collapse as the fishing fleets cannot agree to keep their catches within the scientific advice.
In April, the UK’s Marine Conservation Society warned consumers that mackerel should no longer be considered a sustainable seafood, stating that the fish “is under immense pressure from fishing activities across multiple nations, and the stock will soon be no longer able to sustain itself.”
The Taoiseach is unlikely to mention these things in his speech in Nice. He may find comfort in the fact that other EU nations are scarcely any different in pursuing a dual approach of lofty speeches on the one hand while egging on over-exploitation on the other.
There is tacit recognition of this in the call by EU president Ursula von der Leyen for a European Oceans Pact, which will be discussed at the UN conference in France next week. This must bring greater coherence to the mixed messages we hear that pit restoration of marine life against unrestrained economic extraction.
Ireland could play a leading role in setting out this vision, but this is hard when the Taoiseach himself has failed so badly in delivering on his own commitments at home.
Pádraic Fogarty is an environmental campaigner.
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