Minister Simon Coveney has received a complaint made by an NGO due to sea lice investigation. (Photo: Stock File)

Green group lodges complaint against govt for cover-up

REPUBLIC OF IRELAND
Friday, July 05, 2013, 23:50 (GMT + 9)

The environmental group Friends of the Irish Environment (FIE) has lodged a “request for redress of mal–administration” to Agriculture Food and Fisheries (DAFF) Minister Simon Coveney alleging that the department knowingly misled the European Commission (EC) as it was investigating the relationship between sea lice and wild salmon.

According to the NGO, when the EC specifically requested a report prepared by Inland Fisheries Ireland (IFI), which had been forwarded to the DAFF by the Department of Communications Energy and Natural Resources (DCENR), the DAFF claimed it did not have it and thus did not send it to the EC authorities.

FIE states the report condemns the official position put in by the DAFF in response to the complaint filed in June 2010 and ensured it was sent from the DCENR to the DAFF in November 2010 but the Department of Agriculture denied having it when the EU investigation was taking place in November 2011.

Consequently, the ONG argue that the EU complaint was dismissed last year and the minister ordered an application for the doubling of Ireland’s salmon production.

FIE claims the suppressed report that was never sent to the EC points to examples from Marine Institute salmon farm lice records, stating: “This does not constitute good sea lice control.” It concluded that wild salmon deaths caused by sea lice have been well documented.

The report, marked “final” and sent to the same official who denied its existence to the Commission investigation less than a year later, concluded that it is possible for sea lice to move from farmed salmon to outward migrating wild salmon smolts in any estuary with a marine salmon farm nearby. 

The Report and letters both are published on the Friend’s website after the group was able to take hold of the documents via a series of Access to Information Requests made nationally and in Europe and a detailed investigation. 

“In many years of reading files and preparing cases, I have never seen such brazen behaviour. Essentially, Simon Coveney’s Department gave the two fingers to the EU investigation because it stood in the way of their expansionist plans,” FIE Director Tony Lowes stated.

“We are seeking to have the investigation reopened,” he asserted. 

Lowes said that the group is also asking to have plans for expansion of the industry in Galway Bay postponed until a Strategic Environmental Assessment Environmental Report is prepared of the 2014–19 National Development Plans [NDP] Seafood Operational Programme. The document prepared for NDP 2007–13 led to an agreement to postpone increased targets for farmed salmon until the sea lice issue was resolved.

MEP Nessa Childers said she was “very disturbed” by the news.

“In everyone’s best interests, I am writing to the Commissioner about the matter to ensure that the full facts are brought into the public domain,” she stated.

Meanwhile, the Marine Institute holds that studies carried out in Ireland and Norway both found found that sea lice were only “a minor and irregular component of marine mortality in the stocks studied and is unlikely to be a significant factor influencing conservation status of salmon stocks.”

Related article:

- Pollution seems more harmful to wild salmon than aquaculture

By Natalia Real
[email protected]
www.seafood.media

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