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THE RECENTLY ANNOUNCED safety plan for fishermen, which will see nearly €1 million in grants being handed out, is intended to become mandatory, Minister Simon Coveney has said.
Speaking to TheJournal.ie, Coveney said that the scheme is a “carrot and stick” with the aim of encouraging fishermen and boat owners to upgrade their gear.
“Technology can solve a lot of problems at sea, it won’t solve all problems because it’s actually a person’s attitude is the most important here, towards wearing a lifejackets, towards making sure their boat is properly equipped to actually employing the right people who’ve been through proper training to minimise the liklihood of an accident,” he said.
Though the minister said that there will always be freak accidents at sea, he added that much of the loss and grief over the last year was preventable. Coveney spoke with emotion about the number of deaths at sea while he has been minister and of the death of his own father, who drowned in 1998.
“Since I’ve become a Minister, I have been to just too many funerals and scenes of bodies being brought ashore by the coast guard or the naval dive unit or the garda dive unit and it is just, for any family – my own included - who have been through the awful experience of losing somebody close to you through drowning, it is just something that takes a very, very long time to cope with,” he said.
(Video: © TheJournal.ie)
The grants offered under the scheme will allow fishermen to buy technology with the aim of ensuring that if someone falls overboard or a boat sinks, that not only do they stay afloat by wearing lifejackets but that an emergency signal is sent out straight away. The Minister explained:
A number of the accidents we’ve seen in the last number of years have involved boats capsizing, sinking, people being in the water and the emergency services not actually hearing about that for maybe two or three hours and as a result, bodies have been picked up who’ve died of hypothermia rather than drowning. That just should never happen in the future.
Coveney said that although this is all voluntary right now, he plans to “introduce regulations to make it mandatory in the future”.
“If there’s one thing I do as a marine minister, it’ll be to make fishing, as an industry, but also the broader marine industry, a safer place to work so that we can reduce this needless agony that we go through every year when families lose people,” he added.
In speaking about the deaths of three fishermen off the coast of Waterford recently, Coveney said it was “the saddest funeral I’ve ever been at”.
“We obviously have to wait and see the report from the Marine Casualty Investigation Unit as to how that happened but if there are solutions that can ensure those kinds of accidents are less likely to happen in the future then we have to make sure they’re put in place – whatever it costs,” he added.
(Video © TheJournal.ie)
- Camera by Sinead O’Carroll.
Can we please stop propagating the lies of the English media? Brexit did the damage, not the protocol.
@James Pelow: Very well said. They’re actually using it as a distraction. And it’s drawing us into something that has nothing to do with us. Brexit is the problem. End of story.
You can’t hold a poll asking people if they think the Protocol is good for Northern Ireland without clarifying what the alternative is.
That’s like asking a child if they think the settlement that their parents agreed to after divorce is good.
Let’s be clear… article 16 does not end the protocol. It can suspend a part of it for a short period of time. When the UK says it will trigger A16, call it out for what they want to do….they want to scrap it and force a border on the island of Ireland or a border between Ireland and EU. That’s their plan and I believe it’s been the plan all along. This mess has been made by the UK and the protocol is a plaster. The GB companies that send those goods that will never end up back in the EU (including ROI) need to be better catered for. The issue is that there is no trust between the UK and EU as, so far, the UK hasn’t implemented main parts of the protocol so all at risk goods must be considered guilty until proven innocent.
Ok theJournal…. Time to correct your headlines… “Is Brexit bad or good for firms in Northern Ireland?”
The protocol is a workaround to the main issue, Brexit..
While I’ve no doubt it has caused some legitimate disruption for businesses heavily linked to GB, how did the study take into account costs (for consultancy etc) that would’ve been incurred without the procotol because they also trade with the EU?
Or how did it take into account all the paperwork NI businesses save because they can trade with the Republic and the rest of the EU freely?
All these analyses seem to assume that trade with Ireland was either insignificant, or its continuity was a a given (neither of these are true) and that any disruption with GB is a cost without any quantifiable benefit (again not true).
It’s not the protocol that’s not working. It’s brexit that’s not working.
How dare the EU break away from the United Kingdom. They’ve made things very difficult for everyone, especially the Brits!
By leaving the CU and SM and going for a Sharia Brexit GB turned itself into a legal and regulatory Kaliningrad. Their call-their choice…If they hadn’t CHOSEN that there would be no protocol. They want a hard border in IRL or IRL out the the EU-they will get neither but what they will get is humiliation.
It is improving trade between north and south.
have your say