'Losing my fishing boat is like losing a limb, or my identity'
Uí Was caitlín Dearbhla, Uí Caitlín Mfv Picture: She Demissioned Aodha Aodha's Before
Caitlín Uí Aodha doesn’t cry easily but tears aren’t far from her eyes when she talks about Dearbhla.
While this is the name of her youngest daughter, it was also the name of her 25-metre trawler.
“It hurts, it really hurts,” she says through stifled sobs when she talks about it.
She is upset because late last year, she closed a door on a proud fishing tradition that has been in her family for more than 150 years.
She did what she never thought she would do: she applied to decommission the boat.
The last trip was in December last year.
Her brother Tomas Kelly, who retired from fishing last year, was with her as they both stood in silence as the boat sailed slowly into Galway’s remote Rossaveel Harbour.
Laden with its last catch, Tomas put a comforting arm around Caitlín’s shoulders as she shuddered with stifled sobs watching the boat approach the harbour wall in the drizzling rain.
“She was very upset,” the 74-year-old, who had been with her for comfort but also to sail the boat to the breakers' yard, recalled.
“People probably wouldn’t really appreciate how much owners are invested in their boats.
“Losing them is losing a part of their lives.” The MFV Dearbhla is one of around 42 or so vessels to be scrapped in the Department of Agriculture’s €75m Voluntary Decommissioning Scheme.
For her part, Caitlín no longer sees a future in an industry that just has, as she puts it, “too many negatives”.
A stalwart of an industry that claimed the life of her husband Michael in 2012, she is angry about the way successive Irish governments have failed the country's fishing industry.
“The quotas which rule how much fish Ireland and other EU countries are allowed to catch in EU waters are getting tighter and tighter every year,” she said.
“We had gone through a few difficult years, with covid, Brexit and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which brought extraordinarily high fuel prices last year.
“I just found it impossible to carry on, and I get very emotional.
The tradition she is turning her back on dates to before the Famine.As far back as the early 1800s, the Ó Ceallaigh family — the Kellys — were fishing out of An Rinn, the small coastal Gaeltacht cape overlooking Dungarvan Harbour in Waterford.
Her grandfather William Kelly, fished on the boat Betsy out of Helvick Harbour, while his brother fished An Bhárdal out of nearby Baile na nGall.
Once they were old enough William took his sons, including Caitlín’s father, Tom Kelly to sea.
He was a renowned seine fisherman, who fished with a seine net that hung vertically in the water with its bottom edge held down by weights and its top edge buoyed by floats.
Like her uncle Seánie in his 50ft Taobh a’ Ghleanna and her second cousin Mossey in his 50ft Ardmhór, her father fished out of Helvick Harbour.
A large black and white photograph of him fixing his nets has pride of place against a wall in Iasc, Caitlín’s traditional fish and chips seafood bar in Dungarvan.
Caitlín herself began fishing as a teenager out of Helvick, starting on a herring boat before a stint on the Sinéad, her brother's boat, before getting her skipper's ticket in the early ‘80s.
Shortly afterwards, she was approached by Board Iascaigh Mhara (BIM) and offered finance to build her own boat.
Caitlín took that chance she was given, and eventually took delivery of the 40 foot MFV Inis Ealga, which her late husband, Michael Hayes and herself fished out of Helvick for several years.
She bought the 25m Dearbhla after Michael’s death in the 2012 Tit Bonhomme disaster off the west Cork coast.
He was one of five to perish on the boat he owned and skippered.
The vessel had left Union Hall, Co Cork on Friday, January 13, 2012 with a crew of six to go fishing.
But after experiencing technical difficulties during the trip, it returned to Union Hall in the early hours of January 25.
The sea was very rough at the time and the boat broke up after getting stranded on Adam’s Island on the way into Glandore Harbour.
As well as her husband, crew members Kevin Kershaw, Wael Mohamed, Attaia Shaban and Saied Ali Eldin also perished.
Michael wasn’t far from her mind when she gave Dearbhla up last December.
“It was a very big decision to go back fishing after Michael died, and my children would have been concerned. But leaving her was also very hard too,” she said.
“But leaving her was also very hard too.”
On the bigger picture, she says it has become much more difficult to make a living in the industry.
“Don’t get me wrong, I am all for controls and regulations when it comes to health and safety and of course, the quality controls on our fish.
“But we are just constantly under surveillance, constantly under any number of threats to our quotas, and everything is just so micromanaged, it’s unreal.
“I struggle to think of any industry where every single little thing you do gets so much attention by so many people whose only real job is to control what you do.
“Fishing in Ireland has just become so difficult to do that you actually wonder if the State would just rather the industry was left in the hands of a few huge companies.
“It feels as if small, family-run companies like ours are just being hounded out of the industry.
“It has just become a very hostile place to work, and I don’t mean the sea or the actual fishing.
“It's very difficult to encourage your kids to take it up because it's such a hard life number one, to be a fisherman itself.
“It's not a place you want to be to have a normal life.
“I couldn't allow her to take that on.
“It's extremely sad. It's in the family since my father's father and his father, going back way before the famine.
“It's horrendous to see where we have gone as a nation that is totally surrounded by some of the most abundant fishing waters in the world.”
She doesn’t blame the Irish people, who she believes are “hugely supportive and interested” in the Irish fishing industry.
“The Irish people have a great affiliation with the sea,” she said.
“There's no place in Ireland that you're not that very far from the sea.
“People love to go down to the sea.” She is reminded of the Minister for Agriculture Charlie McConalogue’s often repeated references of his fondness and understanding of the fishing industry because of his having grown up on a farm near the Co Donegal coast.
But it “doesn’t wash” with her; she firmly believes the problem lies at government and State level.
“Any person that's been involved in politics in this country knows the problems in the Irish fishing industry,” she said.
“They know Ireland ended up getting a farcical deal, so there's no point in going back and constantly blaming Europe for everything.
“What is also farcical is the fact that we — as a country — did very little about it and the Irish fishing industry has been unfairly treated ever since.
“More than 85% of the fish in our own waters is fished by someone else, and that shouldn’t be right.
“What I’d like to hear the minister tell us is — what has he done to get us more quota and secure the future of the Irish fishing industry?
“A decommissioning scheme is hardly a plus, as it further erodes what fleet we have, and leads to even less jobs among fishermen and women.”
The Department did not respond to these specific queries when addressed to them by the
The decommissioning scheme and a number of tie-up schemes over the past two years were designed to help mitigate against the quota and financial losses Irish fishermen and women sustained because of Brexit.
The post-Brexit EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) led to the transfer of a substantial amount of EU fishing quotas to the UK.
However, while Ireland’s quota cut helped the TCA over the line, the deal has made it harder for Irish fishermen and women to earn a living.
Ireland’s fishing industry losses from Brexit will amount to around €43m a year by 2026 as part of a five-year EU-UK post-Brexit quota “adjustment” phase.
This amount is the biggest single loss for any country, leading to repeated calls for equitable burden-sharing among all member states.
Both schemes are funded by the €1bn Ireland got from the EU’s Brexit Adjustment Reserve (BAR) fund set up to help member states most affected by Brexit deal with the resulting adverse economic, social, territorial, and environmental consequences.
After it was originally capped at €60m, Mr McConalogue put an extra €15m into the decommissioning scheme.
But that has failed to dampen disquiet in the industry about the scheme among boat owners reluctantly having to accept a proportion of the total value of their boats back.
Added to that, instead of being able to sell them on, boat owners accepted for decommissioning have to scrap their boats and pay back funds they received during the pandemic.
A number were paid not to fish for a number of months over the past two years under the Brexit Temporary Fleet Tie-Up Scheme.
Caitlin and her brother are not the only ones banging the quota drum.
The leading fishing industry CEOs have been — in their own words — “blue in the face” trying to get successive Irish governments to up their game on the issue.
They include Irish South and West Fish Producers Organisation’s Patrick Murphy, Irish Fish Producers Organisation’s Aodh O’Donnell, John Lynch, CEO of the Irish South and East Fish Producers Organisation and the Irish Fish Processors and Exporters Association’s Brendan Byrne.
But Tomas sums up the feelings of the industry when he says: “On the bigger fishing boats, you had everything.
“We had Sky TV, lovely hot showers and Wifi.
“Quota is the main problem, and if we haven’t got quota in our own waters, we will end up without our own fishing fleet.
“It is as simple as that.”