Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-01-21-Speech-5-032"
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"en.20000121.2.5-032"2
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"Mr President, I welcome this report and thank Mrs Ramos for her introduction which was comprehensive and constructive. It is useful to make this effort to promote better dialogue between the European Union and those involved in fisheries. In the part of the European Union I come from, a peripheral region, we have always had particular difficulty in selling the idea of a common fisheries policy to fishermen.
Since Mr MacCormick has brought up the subject – and I have referred to it before – the position is difficult for Ireland because if you took Ireland out of the European Union, you would take a lot of fish with you. Traditionally, Irish fishermen did not catch those fish, because as some people will know, there was a period in our history when it was forbidden by law to put fish into Irish vessels. That situation largely continued until the beginning of this century, and so people were still fishing in outdated curraghs 20 years before we joined the European Union. In any case, it is a fact of life that something like EUR 700 million worth of fish – and perhaps even more because the price of fish has changed – comes out of Irish waters. As a result of the reduction in the structural funds allocated to Ireland, because of its economic growth, the value of fish taken out of what would be Irish waters if there was no European Union will be greater in a couple of years time than the total amount of structural funds coming to Ireland. That makes this proposal even more difficult to sell.
I am not aware that the same is true in any other country of the European Union. Scotland, as part of the United Kingdom, takes its natural share along with the United Kingdom, but Ireland is the one country which does not. This is the only natural resource which I know all Member States concede as common property of the European Union. That does not mean that we do not need to proceed with this dialogue. The extension of the 20-mile limit, which Parliament has agreed to, might be part of the solution and might help to satisfy local fishermen, giving them more control over their lives. I do not want renationalisation, but regionalisation would certainly help the problems of Scotland and Ireland."@en1
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