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Chapter 1: What are Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) and why are they important?
Marine scientist Ben Harris with a pretty unequivocal message and the waters that he was studying off Arran in the Firth of Clyde would be very like a lot of our own. Now, the Taoiseach would have heard all of this when he attended that fair seas conference in Cork on Wednesday morning.
He said that Ireland stood by its 30 by 30 pledge, marine protected area status for 30% of Irish waters by 2030. And then this is the point that the scientific facts come bumping into political reality. What the Taoiseach didn't say was what way these areas would be managed and resourced to ensure that MPAs weren't just lines on maps.
Nor did he say much about what level of consultation the fishermen could expect about where the MPAs would go. Some fishermen say that MPAs aren't needed and will only end their industry. Others say that they support them, but only if there is robust science deciding where they go. John Lynch is the owner of the trawler Iblana, which fishes out of Hoth in Dublin.
He's also CEO of one of the fisherman representative organisations. He's been talking to Suzanne Campbell about whether MPAs are a last hope for the sea or the last straw for the fishermen.
Yeah, the Iblana was built in 1988. It was a French-built stern trawler, 22 metres. We bought in 2004, so we have the boat 22 years now.
And this is the wheelhouse.
This is the wheelhouse, yeah. The centre of command, I suppose, for the skipper, yeah. When the boat's at sea, there's someone up here 24 hours a day.
And tell us about all these electronic charts.
Different things, electronic charts, radars, fish finders.
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Chapter 2: How do fishermen perceive the introduction of MPAs?
So there's different ways of managing different features. There's also the issue of where if you put an MPA in an area where there currently is a heavily fished area and it's productive year after year. Some fishing areas are like that, you know, they're just particularly in terms of nephrops.
The Dublin Bay prawn.
That kind of thing, yeah.
So it's a pretty solid population, isn't it?
Yeah, yeah. And they're sedentary. So they live in that type of seabed and they stay there.
Yeah.
They've been there year after year for however long they're being fished. And if you were to put an MPA in the middle of that kind of an area and the vessels have to move away out of the MPA, then they may increase their impact on the environment.
Because if they're not in the area of the most dense population of the Dublin Bay prawns, well, then they're going to have to fish harder to catch their quota. Remember, the quota won't change because the stock is the same. So the quota will be the same. It'll go up and down with the fluctuations, but generally it'll be the same. And that has the potential to do more harm than good.
And not just in the Dublin Bay prawns, in other species as well. We're going into the galley.
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