Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-02-12-Speech-1-111"
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"en.20010212.7.1-111"2
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"Mr President, I should like to thank Mr Nicholson for his report, and for the speed with which he researched and did the work. I appreciate his very open and honest attitude to this. He has not gone back and told fishermen around the Irish Sea that the European Commission is trying to persecute them or to do them an injustice. He has put the problem to the public at home the way he has put it here. A problem exists.
Our colleague over in the far corner of the House spoke earlier and quoted the Bible. The Bible, someone said, tells us that there will always be fish in the sea. Well, I want to quote a more up-to-date document about the codfish. I am quoting the author Mark Kurlansky in his book 'Cod: A Biography of the Fish that changed the World'. According to Kurlansky, the Encyclopaedia of Commerce and Navigation printed in New York in 1858 said that the codfish was a species so well-known that there was no need to explain anything about it, that it was extraordinarily prolific and that someone had counted the eggs of a middling-sized codfish and found that there were 9 835 000 eggs. The encyclopaedia came to the conclusion that mankind could never exterminate this species. We have proven both the Bible and this nineteenth-century encyclopaedia wrong.
Mr Stevenson is too young to remember the cod wars which were fought around the coast of Iceland in my lifetime – in fact, at a time when I was already in politics. The British – with due respect to all States in the Union – sent warships to Icelandic waters to ensure that their fishermen were protected when going there to fish the stocks in Icelandic waters. It is good that opinion in Britain is changing in favour of the right of coastal fishermen, which I always accepted, to exploit their own resources.
With all due respect to Mr Stevenson, who is a good representative of his people and very enthusiastic, I do not accept that the common fisheries policy is a failure. I do not accept that British fishermen have been wronged, because if you look at the figures the British fishing industry is getting its natural share of European fish. The only country that has been 'wronged' are the Irish fishermen who have been denied their natural share and who were never allowed to exploit the seas. In the sixteenth century the British went to war with the Hanseatic League over Icelandic cod and they only withdrew from that war after some casualties because they discovered a new source of cod off the coast of America.
This is an old story. But do not go back and tell the fishermen of Europe that it is the European Commission which is to be blamed. It is trying to solve a difficult problem."@en1
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