Processors at the leading Irish fishery port of Killybegs are suffering from a lack of raw materials, leaving recently added processing capacity idle.
At a committee hearing of the Irish Parliament, advocates for the port said a combination of competition for stocks from vessels of non-E.U. states like Norway, as well as new weighing requirements at the port, are causing vessels to unload elsewhere. The shift is causing issues for processing facilities – which added capacity with funds provided by the E.U. to compensate the country post-Brexit.
The tonnage of “fish for human consumption” being landed in the country’s top fishery port fell sharply from 141,000 metric tons (MT) to 82,000 MT between 2022 and 2023, Irish member of Parliament Padraic MacLochlainn said during a hearing in the Irish Parliament.
“The processing sector’s lack of raw material is seriously challenging,” Sinead McSherry, the top fisheries official at the Irish ministry of agriculture, said at the same committee hearing.
Irish Fish Producers Organization (IFPO) CEO Aodh O’Donnell told SeafoodSource the situation in Killybegs in 2024 is “much worse, with a major decline reported anecdotally in landings of key species for human consumption such as pelagics.”
Part of the reason for the lower landings, according to MacLochlainn, is Killybegs-based vessels are landing their catch at different ports “because they just cannot deal with the level of bureaucracy they face,” he said. The E.U. changed how Ireland is required to weight its catch in 2021, shifting the task of weighing to the port rather than in factories as was the previous method – a process which O’Donnell said needs refinement.
“A key to encouraging landings to Ireland is to streamline the process and minimize the level of bureaucracy associated with landing,” O’Donnell said. “While Ireland is unique in having some state-of-the-art monitoring and control technologies, the process for landings is perceived as ...
