#Fishing - The Guardian's damning exposé of exploitation in the Irish fishing fleet is not representative of the industry as a whole, according to the head of one of Ireland's top fishing co-operatives.
John Nolan of the Castletownbere Fishermen's Co-op told The Irish Times that his members "would have no truck with trafficking people or abusing people or anything like that and I can say that any foreign nationals working on our boats are treated the same as the Irish crew."
As previously reported on Afloat.ie, Monday's lengthy investigative report by the Guardian revealed evidence of exploitation of migrant workers at all main fishing ports in the Republic on both prawn and whitefish boats.
It also carried the first-hand accounts of a number of foreign fishermen, some of whom say they were trafficked into the State, ad who described a "catalogue of abuses" including overwork, sleep deprivation, being confined to their vessels in port, and lack of safety training – the latter believed to be a contributory factor in the tragic loss of five fishermen on the Tit Bonhomme of Union Hall in January 2012.
However, Nolan dismissed notions that the Irish fishing fleet is "some sort of sweatshop industry", adding that he "would be certain that 95 per cent of boat owners treat their crew properly and I just don't recognise the industry I know from the Guardian article."
His sentiments were echoed by The Skipper editor Niall Duffy, who argued that the majority of undocumented workers in the industry were comparable to Irish working without visas in the United States, and that the situation is "an entirely different issue to how they were treated".
In other fishing news, a skipper from Northern Ireland has been fined after being convicted of fishing for king scallops in a closed area off the Isle of Man.
As BBC News reports, Ryan Newell and the crew of his body Golden Fleece were caught fishing off the Manx coast on Sunday 1 November. He was fined £5,000 and ordered to forfeit his scallop catch, worth over £2,000.