McHugh, Kevin (1946–2006), fisherman and businessman, was born in Bullsmouth, Achill Island, Co. Mayo, on 26 May 1946, the fourth of eight children of Michael McHugh, ESB maintenance engineer, and his wife Norah (née Lavelle). Educated locally at Bullsmouth national school and Cashel vocational school, he played Gaelic football for Achill minors and enjoyed sea angling, winning the Connacht championship at the Achill sea festival in 1962. He worked briefly as an electrician after completing his group certificate.
Thanks to a family connection, in 1963 he spent three months as a cabin boy on the wooden-hulled Eiscir Riada, fishing from Balbriggan, Co. Dublin. Encouraged, he joined a Bord Iascaigh Mhara (BIM) course for trainee fishermen at Haulbowline, Co. Cork, the first of its kind in Ireland, where his single-mindedness made him unpopular with the other apprentices. He then worked on ships based in Balbriggan and Howth, Co. Dublin, before spending a year in the mid 1960s on a ship operating in Icelandic waters, experiencing tough seafaring conditions and learning all aspects of large-vessel operations. Upon qualifying as a skipper in March 1967, he piloted boats for various owners out of Howth.
About 1970 he bought second-hand for £23,000 his first ship, the Wave Crest, with BIM providing 90 per cent of the financing. Trawling off the south-east coast, mainly for herring, but also other pelagic (mid-water) fish, he operated from Howth and stood out as hardworking and business-like. An unassuming and reserved family man, he was more respected than liked by peers and subordinates, but inspired loyalty. Having married a local woman, Vera Ryan, he lived at Lusk, Co. Dublin, until depleted herring stocks closed his main fishing ground, the Celtic Sea, and compelled his migration in 1977 to Killybegs, Co. Donegal.
The advent in 1976 of the EEC's intervention system in Ireland precipitated a scramble to buy larger ships as, in acting as a buyer of last resort, the system liberated Irish fishermen from the constraints imposed by an inadequate domestic fish-processing outlet. McHugh executed a particularly audacious leap in commissioning for £1.2 million his first steel ship, the 90-foot Albacore, featuring novelties (in Irish terms) such as advanced sonar equipment and refrigerated seawater tanks for storing fish. In what proved a recurring theme, his determination to play a pioneering role in the creation of an indigenous industrial trawler sector aroused equal measures of admiration and scepticism.
With the Albacore he engaged in purse-seining, a new fishing method involving a circular net that he and his crew failed to master, enduring a series of expensive mishaps while also struggling to adjust to a larger vessel and suffering from strict herring quotas and escalating fuel costs. He was rescued by the development of more sophisticated echo sounders, for the first time enabling trawlers to successfully hunt the mackerel shoals off Killybegs. Combined with the advantages that the intervention system conferred on fishermen who caught in large quantities, this induced McHugh and the rest of the Killybegs fleet to switch to mackerel, which was plentiful and not subject to quotas, though commanding nothing like the price of herring. Desisting from purse-seining, he reverted to pair-trawling, whereby the trawl is carried between two ships; this was less cumbersome and more suited to the unpredictable movements of the mackerel migrating between Norway and St George's Channel.
Initially most of the mackerel was sold into intervention, but by 1980 a market had emerged for this high-protein food in developing countries. Sustained world demand ensured that the EEC's reform of its intervention system in the early 1980s had no adverse effect on the Killybegs fleet, which gorged off a mackerel bonanza persisting into the late 1980s when the first quotas were imposed. McHugh ordered a 133-foot, £2.3 million trawler called the Antarctic in 1980, having it enlarged and updated in 1985, and confounded those unconvinced that such ships could viably hunt low-value mackerel. In fact such fishing was profitable only in bulk, requiring vessels with sophisticated storage facilities to preserve the catch and concentrating wealth on a handful of Killybegs 'mackerel millionaires', McHugh foremost among them, capable of affording ever larger ships.
Their efforts in building up a pelagic fleet helped Ireland obtain 16 per cent of the pelagic quota, compared with 4 per cent overall, upon the establishment of the common fisheries policy in 1983. Yet McHugh and his peers still had to share the Irish waters' pelagic harvest with ultra-modern Dutch trawlers. To bridge this technology gap, he enlisted the finance and expertise of a non-EEC fishing nation anxious to profit, albeit indirectly, from operations within EEC waters. After the Albacore, his ships were built in Norwegian shipyards and were for long financed by a combination of Norwegian banks and Norwegian government grants.
By the mid 1980s, the mackerel shoals were moving further out to sea, intensifying the need for larger boats capable of undertaking longer journeys and storing more fish. McHugh diversified into other pelagic species such as scad and horse mackerel, and in 1987 commissioned Ireland's first factory ship, complete with freezer storage, the 350-foot Veronica, which adorned an Irish postage stamp and in tandem with the smaller Genesis formed what was considered the world's most successful pair-trawling combination. From the late 1980s he landed little of his catch in Killybegs because he had to hunt so far afield and because prices were better in foreign ports. To compensate, he contributed to the town's late 1980s' development boom by renovating the Killybegs Hotel, buying the Cope Hotel and a local pub, and holding a large stake in two fish-processing companies and a net-making factory.
This gratified local politicians, helping to withstand criticisms that the pelagic super trawlers at Killybegs were thriving at the expense of the demersal or 'whitefish' ships, which hunted deep-lying fish, operated on a small scale, and comprised the bulk of the Irish fishing fleet. The whitefish ships bore the brunt of EEC conservation measures designed to reduce Ireland's fishing capacity while the pelagic sector swelled imperviously, benefiting from the clout wielded by the Killybegs Fishermen's Organisation, whose members, McHugh included, donated generously to the dominant Fianna Fáil party. For all his sea-craft and acumen, McHugh's advancement owed more to his exploitation of market imperfections resulting from the haphazard, politically motivated enforcement of supra-national fisheries regulations.
In June 1992 the Veronica was damaged in a fire while undergoing repairs in the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast. The insurers refused to write the ship off, making an ex gratia payment after protracted wrangling. McHugh sold the vessel and commissioned for £25 million the slightly bigger Veronica II, which put to sea in January 1995. Whereas the other Killybegs fishing moguls scaled back operations in response to diminished mackerel hauls and the stricter enforcement of quotas, McHugh continued to expand in defiance of EEC policy and roamed to the south Atlantic in search of prey – behaviour suggestive less of calculated brinksmanship and more of an Ahab-like compulsion.
Coveting the thriving Sardinella and other pelagic fish swimming off the coast of Mauritania in west Africa, he embarked on his biggest gamble yet, ordering in 1997 the gargantuan, 475-foot, 14,000-ton Atlantic Dawn for €63.5 million (£50 million). With Ireland's pelagic fleet already comfortably exceeding the size limit prescribed by EU regulations, the Department of the Marine expressed unease but was overborne, not least because the Atlantic Dawn was financed by a loan consortium comprising the major Irish banks and powerful Irish investors.
In late 1999 the Irish government applied to Brussels to accommodate the Atlantic Dawn by increasing the permitted size of Ireland's pelagic fleet, propounding McHugh's argument that the conservation issue was irrelevant since it would fish outside Europe. The European Commission demurred, and when the Atlantic Dawn was delivered to McHugh in 2000 the Irish government placed it on the mercantile marine register and granted a series of temporary fishing licences. Hiring a relative of the Mauritanian president as his local agent, he also reached a private agreement with the Mauritanian government allowing the Atlantic Dawn into its waters.
These provisional arrangements dissatisfied his bankers who, in order to be assured of enforcing the terms of their mortgage, wanted the ship registered as an Irish fishing vessel. Furthermore, in late 2001 the European Commission initiated infringement proceedings against Ireland for exceeding its fleet size limits and for placing the Atlantic Dawn on its mercantile marine register. The Irish government lobbied energetically on McHugh's behalf, and in December 2001 a complex resolution was achieved with Brussels, allowing the Atlantic Dawn onto the Irish fishing register, while the Veronica II, which he had retained, was barred from Europe. Accordingly, the Atlantic Dawn trawled for three months of the year in European waters and spent the remainder off Mauritania alongside the Veronica II, which was registered as a Panamanian vessel, thereby utilising a notorious flag of convenience, typically exploited to evade safety regulations and fishing quotas.
This deal aroused widespread misgivings among Irish fishermen who felt that Ireland's negotiating capital had been expended on one ship. Moreover, McHugh retained the Veronica II's 5,200-ton fishing entitlement (later reduced to 4,400 tons) at a time when EEC capacity restrictions had caused the emergence of a market in tonnage rights, enabling him to sell his surplus tonnage for €40 million during 2003–4. It was estimated that McHugh received a further effective subsidy from the government of €60 million arising from the tonnage entitlement attendant on the Atlantic Dawn's registration in Ireland.
The Atlantic Dawn was one of many international super trawlers that infringed with impunity on the coastal zone reserved for Mauritania's indigenous artisanal fishermen, many of whom, aside from being materially disadvantaged by this unequal competition, perished when their flimsy wooden boats were capsized or crushed by the passing leviathans. The largest trawler in the region, perhaps worldwide, Atlantic Dawn attracted particular opprobrium from the locals who dubbed it 'the ship from hell' and from conservationists who likened it to a destroyer. Equipped with purse-seine nets 3,600 feet in circumference and 550 feet deep, trawl nets 1,200 feet in breadth and 96 feet in height, and a 7,000-ton-capacity storage area, it could process 300 tons of fish daily. The nets indiscriminately killed turtles, dolphins and sharks, and devastated the seafloor habitat in shallow waters.
Both the Atlantic Dawn and Veronica II docked at Las Palmas in the Canary Islands, landing most of their catch in Agadir, Morocco, where McHugh was 49 per cent owner of a fish-processing and canning concern employing about 500 workers. He also owned a cold-storage and fish-sales concern and two fish-processing businesses in Killybegs, as well as a fish-processing plant in Norway. Obliged by his expanding business interests to spend more time on land, he had insisted nonetheless on skippering the newly launched Atlantic Dawn until he was confident that it was running smoothly.
The Atlantic Dawn Limited group encompassing his commercial interests employed about 165 workers and reported a trading profit of €15.6 million in 2003, making rapid progress in repaying its debt. In 2004, however, Price Waterhouse Cooper resigned as auditors of Atlantic Dawn Ltd, stating that its client had not kept proper records, after the company admitted that an internal review had uncovered a previously unrecorded asset, requiring a €4.5 million tax settlement. Seemingly embarrassed by press reports highlighting its profitability, McHugh re-registered his business as an unlimited private company in 2005, precluding further financial disclosures.
His profits were underpinned by ruthless labour policies: during the Atlantic Dawn's first year of operation, cheaper Russian workers replaced most of the Irish crew. From the late 1990s his men signed employment contracts with a Hong Kong-registered services entity, facilitating lower wages and more onerous employment terms while reducing his exposure to compensation claims ensuing from work accidents. In November 2003 two sacked fishermen allegedly unaware of these arrangements were awarded €39,000 by the employment appeals tribunal, which rejected McHugh's claim that they were not employees but shareholders working for the Hong Kong company. That year the marine casualty investigation board found that the Atlantic Dawn was not complying with manning regulations when its acting second mate died in October 2002 after becoming entangled in net-handling machinery.
When protests in Mauritania forced the government to banish the Veronica II in autumn 2004, McHugh attempted to gain access to Australian waters, but the publicisation of his intentions caused such controversy that the previously sympathetic Australian government balked. By mid 2005, the Veronica II was once more fishing off west Africa. However, after a military junta seized power in Mauritania in August, the navy repeatedly boarded the Atlantic Dawn, imposing a $250,000 fine and seizing its catch. He withdrew his ships from the region that autumn, later part selling the Veronica II for conversion into a seismic research vessel. In 2006 the Atlantic Dawn was trawling in the south Pacific, beyond the 200-mile exclusion zone off Chile, while fishing its European quota off Ireland's coast.
Stricken by a mysterious disease, later diagnosed as the rare brain disorder CJD, McHugh died after a three-month illness on 31 October 2006 in the Mater hospital, Dublin. He was buried at Killybegs and left an estate worth €72.4 million. With his wife he had three sons and a daughter. His sons took over the business and sold the Atlantic Dawn for €35 million in 2007, trawling with smaller vessels and also continuing the processing and fish-sales lines.