Conservation NGO Friends of the Irish Environment (FIE) has asked Ireland’s High Court to reinstate a 2019 decision that discontinued Mowi Ireland’s permit to farm salmon at a site in Southwest Ireland.
Ireland’s Ministry of Agriculture, Food, and the Marine canceled Mowi’s license in 2019 over breaches of a 500-ton annual harvest limit at the firm’s Deenish site, located in Ballinskelligs Bay in County Kerry. Mowi Ireland then appealed the decision to Ireland’s Aquaculture License Appeals Board (ALAB), which in September 2025 reversed the ruling and permitted the operation to continue.
FIE is now asking the High Court to quash ALAB’s determination and restore the original ruling to bring operations at Deenish, which has also been the subject of scrutiny regarding its impact on the local wild salmon population, to an end.
Operations have been allowed to continue at Deenish, despite the original ruling, throughout the appeal process under an Irish legal mechanism that allows aquaculture sites to continue operating on expired licenses, largely due to long delays in the nation’s licensing renewal system.
FIE wants the High Court to set aside that legal mechanism, enacted as an amendment of the country’s 1997 Fisheries Act, and stop operations completely at the Deenish site until Mowi secures a new license, which would require an environmental assessment.
Besides targeting Mowi’s site in particular, FIE said its campaign also more broadly targets the legal mechanisms that allow sites like Deenish to continue operating on expired licenses.
“Our case is about more than one salmon farm in County Kerry; it is about a broken licensing system that lets intensive farms run on a … temporary basis after their licenses expire regardless of continued breaches of license conditions while sea trout and wild salmon vanish and the legally required environmental assessments never happen,” the NGO said.
Irish aquaculture companies are waiting up to six years to get their licenses renewed, mainly due to a shortage of ecologists conducting mandatory assessments. The nation’s licensing system was overhauled in 2007 after being found in contravention of E.U. regulations on habitat protection.
Besides hiring more ecologists, industry stakeholders have proposed extending aquaculture licenses from 10 to 20 years in duration, which they say would also help drive output and bring new producers into the sector. They have also called for greater expertise and manpower in the mapping and preparation of environmental assessments of aquaculture sites.
“It took six years for the ALAB to handle the appeal of the license for [Mowi’s] Bantry Bay site, and this is not acceptable to either business or environmentalists,” Friends of the Irish Environment Director Tony Lowes said in 2024 regarding a license for a salmon farm Mowi has expressed desire to build in the south of Ireland for several years.
