On the 2008 TV Series Trawlermen 3 it was made public that Charlie McBride and his son Charles McBride from Kilkeel in Northern Ireland had been hit with a fine and Proceeds of Crime Act ( P.O.C.A. ) recovery in excess of 350,000. What was not made public until recently is that a further 16 defendants plead guilty to the same offences at the same time and in total their fines only came to 208,700 with fines varying from 800 to 30,000 but the final 3 including Charlie and his Son had fines and the only ones to be subject to the Proceeds of Crime Act to a total of over 1m. How they come to the conclusion that 16 , who were involved in the same overfishing , should pay 20\% of the fines and penalties of the 3 left is beyond me.

No one is saying that Charlie and Charles should not have been fined , they did catch too much Cod after all , but only that they be treated in the same way as the other defendants and not singled out to be given harsher treatment.

Both men are now in prison in Liverpool not for refusing or being unable to repay the fine but for trying to pay it back. The only capital that a fisherman normally has is his boat but the Serious and Organised Crime Agency froze all of their assets so when they tried to get a loan against the boat they were found guilty of contempt of court and sent to prison for 12 weeks with NO appeal allowed.

The P.O.C.A. was never meant to be used in circumstances like this and it does look as if the Assets Recovery Agency are failing to recover the real criminals assets ( the drug dealers , fraudsters , thieves , etc ) so are targeting the Fishermen who , after all , paid the full amount of Income Tax due on the over quota fish which makes the Inland Revenue a beneficiary of a crime thus guilty of accepting money from crime ( but we will never see that taken anywhere will we ).

All we ask is that the P.O.C.A. is only used in the context that it was originally designed for , that is to target the organised crime syndicates and drugs barons that blight this country not hard working men who only caught over quota fish to keep their boat at sea and 6 families off the unemployment lines.