Antares Trawler
Parliament of Ireland December 1990
Mr. H. Byrne: I am pleased to get the opportunity at last to raise this matter. As all of you and the Minister well know, the incident to which I will refer occurred on 22 November 1990. This is one in a succession of incidents that has caused the loss of life of at least 100 people over a ten-year period.
The latest tragedy caused the death of four Scottish fishermen. Immediately one might ask, what is my interest in Scottish fishermen? My interest is that this happened in the North Irish Sea. It is well known that it is a common fishing ground for our own fishermen. Many of our own fishermen, as I will outline later on, have been affected by submarine activity in the Irish Sea to date. I am depending on information from The Irish Times and the Irish Independent. I will be quoting occasionally from them. I would like to relate what happened. The accident happened when the Antares, based at Carradale, Kintyre, was fishing off the Isle of Arran. The Plymouth-based hunter killer submarine, HMS Trenchant, reported to its base that it had hit the gear of a fishing boat. The navy said it surfaced and tried, unsuccessfully, to contact by radio two trawlers in the area. It could see “nothing amiss” and left the scene after contacting lifeguards. Here we have a situation where, when the accident occurred, it seems that the submarine came to the surface and saw nothing amiss. It would be very difficult for it to see anything amiss on the surface at that stage since the four fishermen had been drowned and the trawler had been pulled under the sea.
The point I would like to make at this stage is the inconsiderate fashion in which the Ministry of Defence and, particularly, the submarine acted. They were prepared to move away even though they knew full well that they had hit something. They were prepared to move away and leave the rest to God. We all know what happened, that four people were lost. It is known that onshore on the night of 22 November the wives and girlfriends waited for the four fishermen to return. They were only fishing about ten miles off the coast of Scotland. Of course, they never arrived onshore. The Labour MP, a particularly good friend of mine, Mr. George Foulkes, a long time campaigner for better safety measures in fishing grounds, claimed that the tragedy need not have happened. That is a view I share. He had been warning for 18 months that this kind of thing could happen. He had presented many documents to the Department of Transport and to the Department of Defence over ten years predicting what would happen and what eventually did happen.
A large search, involving a naval frigate and a mine sweeper as well as naval helicopters, found pieces of red wreckage, the same colour as the Antares and it was conclusively discovered that it had been snagged by the submarine Trenchant. The many incidents — and there have been some 90 very serious incidents — in which varying numbers of fishermen lost their lives have been logged. That has happened over a period of ten years. During those ten years — I have not time to list all of the different incidents — the Ministry of Defence in Britain refused at all stages to give any information. Only in this case, the case of the Antares and in the case of the Sheralga about which all of us here would know much more, a trawler fishing out of Clogher Head, did the Ministry of Defence admit that they were responsible.