Ireland

Nótaí taighdeora

Confidence is MEDIUM. Core conservation provisions are anchored in verbatim primary law from the Irish Statute Book (S.I. 230/2006 bass possession size and net ban; S.I. 234/2006 v-notch lobster rule; Fisheries (Consolidation) Act 1959 s.3 definition) and official Inland Fisheries Ireland / SFPA guidance (42 cm bass minimum, 2-fish 24h bag limit, recreational shellfish minimum sizes, prohibition on using breathing apparatus to take shellfish). Two key spearfishing-specific points are well-attested by the national spearfishing federation (spearfishing.ie) and angling community/secondary sources but I could NOT pin them to a single verbatim primary-law section within the research budget: (a) the outright ban on spearfishing in freshwater, and (b) the prohibition on taking salmon/sea trout/salmonids by spear. These are treated as restrictions, not fabricated as verbatim law. The Fisheries (Consolidation) Act 1959 prohibits taking salmon/trout by instruments other than rod and line and restricts unlawful instruments, but the exact section/subsection wording could not be retrieved verbatim (irishstatutebook section numbering for the enacted text did not surface the instruments-prohibition text on the pages fetched). The bass 40 cm figure in S.I. 230/2006 is the original 2006 possession size; the current binding minimum conservation reference size is 42 cm (EU MCRS, reflected in later instruments/guidance) - both are recorded. spearfishing.ie was not fetchable (expired TLS certificate) and fishinginireland.info returned HTTP 403, so those were corroborated via search snippets and secondary sources rather than direct fetch. Applies to the Republic of Ireland only; Northern Ireland is a separate UK jurisdiction with different rules.