Seven fishermen have been rescued at sea after an Irish-registered boat sank in British waters 110 miles south of Mizen Head, Co Cork today.
The Discovery, which fishes out of Castletownbere, sunk after the British coastguard at Falmouth was alerted that it was in difficulty at around 11am.
The seven crewmen - two Irish, two Polish, one Lithuanian, one Latvian and one Portuguese man, were rescued from a life raft and they were taken on board the Font Commander, a merchant vessel en route to Rotterdam.
The British coastguard will shortly take the men from that ship and to Cornwall in England, the spokeswoman said.
Two of the men are suffering from mild hypothermian and will be taken to Truro hospital. The spokeswoman said weather conditions were not bad in the area where the ship sank this morning. No further information is available on what may have happened to the fishing boat.
The independent Marine Casualty Investigation Board may investigate such incidents. It is the third sinking of an Irish trawler in recent weeks.
Diving operations around the sunken trawler Pere Charles, which sunk off the coast of Dunmore East, Co Waterford, on January 10th, were called off yesterday.
Irish Coast Guard officials met with the families of the five missing fisherman from the Pere Charleson Saturday night to brief them. Divers searched the trawler and its environs in recent days, and shoreline searches will continue until later this week.
It was hoped the bodies of skipper Tom Hennessy, his uncle Pat Hennessy, Pat Coady, Billy O'Connor and Andriy Dyrin from Ukraine would still be on board, but they have not been found.
Coast guards backed by local volunteers yesterday continued the search of the shoreline near where another trawler, the Honeydew II, which sank within hours of the Pere Charles. The teams covered the Waterford/Wexford coast from Ardmore to Carnsore.
Ger Bohan and his crewman, Tomasz Jagla from Poland, have been missing since the Honeydew IIwent down off Mine Head in west Waterford after being hit by a 15-metre-high wave on January 11th. Two other men survived.
Garda divers searched sections of the Honeydew II, which lies off the Waterford coast but failed to find the bodies of the crewmen.