The Government's claim that the Attorney General is blocking efforts to impose fines, rather than criminal penalties, on sea fishermen who flout conservation laws has been rejected sharply by Fianna Fáil TDs.
Yesterday, TDs scrapped plans to debate the Committee Stage of the Sea Fisheries and Maritime Jurisdiction Bill because they had not received copies of all the amendments proposed to the controversial legislation.
Currently, fishermen face prosecution in the Circuit Court if they are found to have over-fished, failed to keep records, or if they have fished for banned species.
The Minister of State for the Marine, Pat "the Cope" Gallagher, last month said the AG, Rory Brady, had said the State was constitutionally barred from imposing traffic penalty-like fines on guilty fishermen.
However, this analysis has been sharply rejected by a senior counsel recruited by the Fianna Fáil-controlled Dáil Committee on Communications, Marine and Natural Resources.
In a report to the committee, Eanna Mulloy SC said: "It is a brave lawyer who asserts without fear of contradiction that there is no valid power in Irish law to impose sanctions upon Irish or EU member state vessels, other than by recourse through the criminal justice system." Irish law, he said, is "profuse with cases in which administrative sanctions, notwithstanding wide-ranging legislative and constitutional challenges, were upheld.
"That these sanctions, imposed otherwise than as convictions, sentences and penalties in public courts by judges appointed in accordance with law and the Constitution, nevertheless had sufficient 'bite' to deter the objects of those sanctions is attested to by the repeated, and generally doomed, efforts to have them declared null and void.
"I therefore see no valid legal objection to the introduction of such a scheme of administrative sanctions into Irish law, given that the criminal offences and sanctions now under investigation are not desired by the European Commission," wrote Mr Mulloy.
Fianna Fáil Cork South West TD Denis O'Donovan said one of his constituents had ended up with a criminal record and a €50,000 bill because the Naval Service had detained him with two boxes of monkfish on board.
Mr Mulloy's confidential brief is to be debated next week by the Oireachtas committee, the committee's chairman, Fianna Fáil Cork North Central TD Noel O'Flynn decided yesterday.
The fisheries legislation has provoked outrage among FF TDs in coastal constituencies, and a number of concessions last month by the Government has failed to assuage them.
Describing it as an "appalling" and "deeply flawed" Bill, Fine Gael Sligo/Leitrim TD John Perry said the Minister of State should not think that he has "pacified his critics".
Criminal sanctions and fishing gear confiscations are the remedy only for serious and persistent offenders, said Mr Perry - a view, he said, which the European Commission also supported.
Mr O'Flynn pointed out strongly to Mr Gallagher that the committee's own legal advice disagreed strongly with the Attorney General.
"It is quite clear that there seems to be a misunderstanding about the advice that you have received from the AG. Of course, it depends on the question the AG was asked, doesn't it?"
Dozens of administrative fines were levied daily in the State "from traffic fines to litter fines to penalty points to inland fisheries, and the current AG was the one who wrote the statutory instrument for that one", Mr O'Flynn said.
