Action needed to protect migrant fishers working on foreign vessels in Irish waters, says union

The organisation that seeks to represent the interests of non-EU fishermen working in Irish waters has called for the Government to honour its commitment to ratify the International Labour Organisation’s (ILO) Work in Fishing Convention after claims that the crews on two German-registered fishing vessels detained in Cork were having to work seven days a week for less than €3 an hour.

Speaking in the Dáil on Tuesday, Mick Barry TD said he had seen contracts for some of the 27 mainly Indonesian crew on the two fishing vessels, the Pesorsa Dos and the Ortega Tres.

He said that in the case of the Ortega Tres, the contracts “promised them a mere €800 per month and illegally claim that there is no limit on the hours the fishers must work for that €800″.

In respect of the Pesorsa Dos, he said: “The contracts filed with the German authorities portray the crew on superior conditions that meet German regulations than what is in the parallel contract issued to the crews themselves.

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“In the sample I have, the official contract has the fisher on €2,000 per month but the version given the fisher promises €1,000, although in his case he was not even paid that having been voluntarily repatriated from the State last week without having received a cent since boarding that vessel in late December.”

Mr Barry told the Dáil that while the skippers of the vessels could be prosecuted for alleged breaches of sea-fisheries legislation, Ireland’s failure to ratify the ILO convention left State agencies unable to intervene in a situation where workers might be receiving “€4.40, only one-third of the statutory minimum wage”, a figure he said he based on a calculation involving a 40 hour working week.

Michael O’Brien, the fisheries campaign lead in Ireland for the International Transport Workers’ Federation, said the fishers in question told him the reality was they were at times expected to work 12 hour days, seven days a week, something that would put their hourly rate at under €3.

Mr O’Brien said that, after recent improvements in the entitlements of non-EU migrant workers employed on Irish registered vessels, the inability to police the working conditions of fishermen on foreign registered boats was giving the operators of the vessels a major competitive advantage over their Irish counterparts as there can be “a huge differential in pay”.

He said he hoped that alone might prompt action on ratification more than four years after the Government ran a consultation process on the convention which it subsequently committed to ratifying.

In the meantime, Mr O’Brien said: “It is embarrassing that Ireland is in effect relying on other governments to protect fishers whose rights have been violated in Irish territorial waters. This situation will be repeated time and again until Ireland meets its international obligations. Step one is ratifying C188 (the ILO convention) and enforcing it properly.”

In response to Mr Barry, Minister for State at the Department of Public Expenditure, Ossian Smyth, said the Department of Transport is progressing work on the Merchant Shipping (international conventions) Bill in order to formally ratify the provisions of the ILO convention “in the near future”.