EU fisheries ministers have agreed to ban the practice of discarding fish at sea.
Discarding occurs when fishermen throw back fish because they have exceeded their quota or caught species for which they have no quota.
An estimated 25 per cent of all fish caught by EU states are discarded, with the percentage of discards believed to be as high as 50 per cent in some areas.
After what was described as "tense" negotiations, ministers reached an agreement early this morning in Brussels.
The ban on discards will be introduced on a phased basis starting in January 2014 for pelagic stocks - surface fish such as mackerel and herring - and moving onto the Baltic Sea in January 2015.
It will extend to the main demersal stocks such as hake and monkfish in the North Sea and the North and South Western waters from January 2016. Finally the discard ban will apply to fisheries in the Mediterranean, the Black Sea and all other Union waters on January 1st, 2017.
Minister for Agriculture Simon Coveney, who helped to broker the agreement, described it as an historic milestone.
"We have set an ambitious timeframe starting in January 2014, for introducing the discard ban underpinned by specific management tools to ensure its delivery," he said.
"The discarding issue was always going to be contentious and resolving it difficult not that there was any disagreement on the overall objective, but because there were divergent views on the associated management tools needed to make a discard ban a reality in practice."
Mr Coveney said more selective fishing gear will be introduced and a new fund made available to support fishermen as they adjust to landing what they catch.
However, Irish fishermen have warned that a ban on dumping dead fish at sea is the wrong tactic.
The Federation of Irish Fishermen (FIF) and the Irish South and West Fish Producers Organisation (ISWFO) said it is unrealistic to think that new rules on discards of small and juvenile fish could be enforced by January next year.
Eibhlin O'Sullivan, chief executive at the ISWFO, said fisheries chiefs should have been looking to prevent the catching of young fish to begin with.
"It's still terribly vague. But we disagree with the approach from the start," she said. "They are starting with what to do with the discards, but we'd start with trying to avoid catching them in the first place - if the fish are dead on land or dead at sea they are still dead.
"From our perspective there's a distinct lack of detail."
Fishermen claim the 10-month run-in to implement the first ban on discards of small and juvenile herring and whiting is too short a timeframe.
The ISWFO claimed that fisheries chiefs should have been looking at a wider range of initiatives including real-time and seasonal closure of fishing, feeding and spawning grounds and more advanced variations in fishing gear such as net types, mesh sizes and escape hatches.
The FIF said it is important that the focus does not shift back to simply landing everything a trawler catches and warned it is naive to think that would solve the crisis.
Additional reporting: PA