From facing off with the Russian navy, to giving up a five-generation fishing tradition 

Himself and the Irish South and West Fish Producers Organisation CEO Patrick Murphy even met the Russian ambassador to demand the exercises be called off.

The whole episode led to an interview with the two men on CNN going viral, prompting Hollywood actress Mia Farrow to comment: “Nobody messes with the Irish.” E Street Band guitarist Steven Van Zandt commented: “Gotta love the Irish fishermen that made the Russians move their navy war games!"

Fast forward a year and a man who was prepared to stand up to the Russian navy is on the verge of giving up his own fight to stay in the Irish fishing industry.

Limbo

The 51-year-old has been in a state of limbo since September.

This was when he applied to join the decommissioning scheme brought in to compensate the fishing industry for lost quota after the EU-Brexit deal.

However, due to the amount of time it will take before his application is fully assessed or — possibly — approved, he hasn’t been able to fish.

The boat he owns with his father Peter needs around €40,000-€50,000 repair and maintenance work done to it before he goes back out to sea.

But that would be money down the drain if he gets approved for what is officially known as the Brexit Voluntary Permanent Cessation Scheme, because a condition of decommissioning is that all boats that get approved for the scheme have to be scrapped.

Added to that, since October, it has been the wrong time of year to be looking for a crew, because most fishermen already on a boat would stay with that boat.

“I have an Irishman and a Spanish guy who would come back if I asked them but I had to be straight with them and tell them I just didn’t know what we would be doing,” Alan says.

But even apart from the limbo he finds himself in, his next big worry is what he does after decommissioning.

 If he is lucky, he'll receive around €800,000 for decommissioning. But by the time he has paid off the bank loans on the boat, and paid the State back other monies owed, he will have little left.

“The bank will get a good share of it and we have to pay back over half of the money we got from the tie-up schemes over the past two years,” he said, as he sits in the chair opposite the steering wheel on his bridge.

We didn’t know that at the time we got that money, that this is what would happen if we went for decommissioning. What little is left is what I hope my father will get to help pay for his retirement after fishing for all his life.

Little options 

“What will I do?

“Maybe I’ll go and work for the wind farms.” The wind farms he refers to are those offshore wind farms planned around the coasts of Ireland.

However, while he could have hoped to hang onto his boat and use it to help him get a job on the wind farms — bringing crew back and forth from the mainland — he won’t even be able to do that.

If he does need a boat, he’ll have to buy another one, and right now he has no idea where he would get the money to do that.

“It’s ironic that I could end up working for the very type of industry that is one of the biggest threats to the fishing industry in Ireland,” he said.

“Wherever you have an offshore wind farm is going to be pretty much impossible for us to fish there.

So, on top of the fact that Irish fishermen have lost quota because of Brexit, they will soon be losing the very space on which they could have relied on for fishing. You add that to the fact that there is a general view in the industry that nobody is really fighting your corner and you have widespread disillusionment.

“It's just getting harder and harder to make a living.

“The rush to build wind farms along the Irish coast is a bit like the great Oklahoma Land Rush of 1889, when thousands of people were able to claim unassigned land in the Indian Territory.

“That’s going to encroach on our fishing grounds and squeeze the industry even further.” 

He says that, like the indigenous Indians in America of the late 1880s, the indigenous Irish fisherman is being pushed further and further out of his fishing grounds.

“They’ll tell you there is consultation, but we met one guy from the industry and he said he would be back and he hasn’t come back at all,” he said.

“I asked him at the meeting beforehand, was this just a box-ticking exercise, and he said ‘no’.

“But if it wasn’t and he didn’t just have to tell someone back in head office he met fishermen, what else was the point of the meeting?” He admits to feeling bitter about what is happening to the fishing industry, after all the years he and his family — back five generations — have fished.

His father Peter started fishing when he was just 13, and his uncles from Bere Island were also in the industry.

Alan himself started fishing in his early teens but went full-time when he was 19 in 1990.

As well as fishing while he was at school, he had also worked in the fish processing plant in Castletownbere, where he and his father — who retired from fishing at sea when he was 60 but still works on shore, repairing nets and “doing the paperwork” — are based.

Domino decline 

“I do feel a bit bitter because after all the years fishing in our family and a lot of other families around here, we are just seeing it declining,” he said.

“Fishing is 90-something percent of the economy around here.

The cutback of the number of boats isn’t just going to the fishermen and their families, it is also going to hit the local shops and services.

“On one small front alone, each boat probably spends up to around €800-a-week on food for its crew, depending on the numbers.

“Then you have the money spent on fuel, and then there are the craftsmen who service the boats, the painters, the carpenters, the plumbers, the electricians.

“The people like my father who, among other things they do, are skilled at repairing nets.

“It’s less work for all of them and that will have a big knock-on effect on the local economy.” 

He will know in the coming days whether or not his application to decommission is acceptable.

By a curious irony, given his brief dealings with the Russian Federation just weeks before the invasion of Ukraine, one of the clauses he and the other 63 boat owners have to agree to is to confirm they are not exporting arms to Russia.

The undertaking they sign references two European Union decisions relating to Russia and they date back to 2014, when armed hostilities between the two countries started.

When the Irish Examiner reported this last month, Patrick Murphy said at the time: “Maybe it is a generic thing now across all contracts?

“After the amount of money people get, and after bills have been paid off, those who go for the scheme will be lucky if they can buy a water pistol, never mind getting involved in the international arms trade with Russia.”