Barry faced off against Victoria Prentis at the EFRA Select Committee today, focussing on the Fisheries Negotiation Outcome.
Barry posed questions of the Minister when raising the issue of non quota stocks that were being caught efficiently by the EU and what the Minister was doing about it as well as what real time data they were collecting on a daily basis and what that data is.
The Minister didn’t manage to answer adequately so Barry pressed again on how is the Department getting real time data. The Department confirmed the data the collect is on a monthly basis not daily and didn’t have answers for how substantial that data is.
That might be because the correct data was only compliant with the 10% tolerance, 40% of the time. When the data was wrong it could be up to 116%. Barry wanted to know what the Department was doing to rectify it. Once again the answer was not satisfactory and the roll out of CatchApp is a huge reason the mental health of fishermen is in such a bad way.