At the Edge of Ireland

by David Yeadon

  22

  With the Fish People

  I’VE HEARD MOST OF THE ARGUMENTS about “the end of the fishing industry” through Draconian restrictions many times, both here and previously up in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland when Anne and I were recently staying on the island of Harris and writing our second Seasons book. But usually the information came through newspaper features or regional TV reports, not directly through the voices and hearts of the fishermen themselves. On this occasion, however, four of them were clustered around one of the tables in the “lower room” of O’Donoghue’s. They weren’t exactly what you’d call “old salts,” but their young-old faces were pale, suggesting quite a long absence from the rigors of trawler voyages. I wasn’t part of this group but close enough to make notes on their conversation, and most revealing it was too…

  “’S GETTING WORSE AND worse with the salmon now. Quota’s down to 90,000 fish from over 250,000 five years ago. How the hell do they expect us to make a living…and how can stocks come back if the young sprats are getting caught up as a bycatch of the mackerel?”

  “Well—there’s always the voluntary compensation packages. Give up y’ license and y’ drift nets and get a nice sack o’ cash from the government. M’be start a B and B or build a guest cottage for rent…”

  “Aw, don’t y’ believe all y’ hear about these packages. What’s to stop ’em just tightening up the quotas and letting us get driven out of business with no compensation at all?”

  “And it’s even worse with the cod and whiting. All but disappearing, and even if you can get a decent catch, fish prices don’t keep up and sometimes it’s hardly worth unloading ’em.”

  “Climate shift is movin’ the shoals. That’s what it is.”

  “Well, they’ve certainly gone from around the Aran Islands and Rosaveel. Prawn grounds on the west are still okay—but there’s no mature fish left. It’s all overworked. Too much intensive fishing. Stocks are ravaged—wiped out. Tows all end up the same. Under-sized or nothin’ at all sometimes. Hardly a sprat for all y’ troubles. And all this—and the fuel going up like the very devil…”

  “And look at the harbors. Decommissioned boats everywhere. Tied up. Useless. All over the country. Never be used again. Terrible, terrible waste of money and men. So many good lives wrecked…”

  “Porcupine Bank’s still good, though…”

  “And what use is that, for God’s sake? We don’t have the big boats. Not like the damn French and Spanish. Been there scraping it clean for twenty years…We’ve always been decades behind…Never got government help…We were all stuck with our smaller boats…Couldn’t compete…”

  Fisherman’s Boots

  “Aye, that’s Ireland now, isn’t that the truth—always at the back of the field, living off the scraps of all those greedy foreign buggers…”

  “Ah, s’not that simple. We didn’t see what was happenin’ with the European Union. Government here gave our fishin’ away in exchange for flush agricultural subsidies for the farmers. There just weren’t enough of us and too many bloody farmers—and now they get all the cash—tons and tons of euros and we sit here moanin’ and groanin’ and doing sweet nothin’.”

  “Yeah—and listen, I’ve got this latest thing in the paper…this report on the fishing by Údarás na Gaeltachta…This’ll make you moan even more…How’s this for statin’ the bleedin’ obvious: ‘There is no doubt that a range of forces, internal and external, continue to work toward the elimination of drift net fishing in Ireland…’”

  “Ah—now there’s new news f’y’…bloody stupid gobshites!”

  “And were they paid to write this crap too?!”

  “Yeah—but listen to this end bit: ‘While we admit we have limited statutory remit in this sector, we acknowledge the importance of the industry, not only for local fishing communities, but for the local fish processing, tourism and restaurant sectors.’”

  “And that’s it?! That’s all it says?!”

  “Just about. They end up claimin’ they support compensation for relinquishing drift net licenses…which is a load of old garbage we’ve heard again and again…”

  “Yeah, but like Sean said, the government could just sit back and let the stocks get so low that we’ll all be bankrupt…without any compensation!”

  “M’be—and m’be what that bunch of backside-scratchin’ bureaucrats needs is what those French guys gave the British Royal Navy when they boarded one of their boats a few weeks back to check out their catch…”

  “And what was that?”

  “Pot loads of toilet crap from the johns…all over their heads!”

  “The French did that?!”

  “Yeah—tough bunch. Don’t like foreigners snooping around. And that’s our problem too…too many commissions and politicians snooping around, writing reports and such like, tellin’ us what we’ve all known for years like it was a brand-new revelation, and making stupid useless suggestions. And in the meantime, we’re all stuck here in port, quotas all finished, no place to take our boats…and just watching the cash get pissed away…”

  “It’s a real terrible mess and no doubt on that…”

  Fisherman with Pot

  “No doubt at all…and no way out…”

  Silence descended on the group, and even the pints of stout remained untouched, circled around the table like dark standing stones raised up in far-distant eras when the ancients who peopled this island believed the gods would always protect them in their times of need.

  Where are those gods today? I wondered…

  I SHARED ALL THIS fascinating new information with Anne and we decided it was time to go looking for these gods and some of their more fortunate recipients.

  And despite all the ongoing moans and groans we found a few. Regular rumors abounded of enormous (if occasionally illegal) hauls here, even after a mere couple of days at sea, resulting in mega-hauls of euros too. Figures of 350,000 to 500,000 euros ($525,000 to $750,000) floated about—for a single trip’s catch! We knew that the harbor at Castletownbere is one of the largest in the southwest, and it’s also Ireland’s largest whitefish port, with tens of thousands of tons of fish landed annually. But we had no idea of the cash splashing about! There are regular flotillas of Spanish, Portuguese, and French trawlers here too—enormous creatures—crammed cheek by jowl beside smaller (but much larger than a decade ago) local craft. With so much technology and state-of-the-art know-how on full display every day, surely it wouldn’t be that hard, we thought, to see how the whole trawling system worked and decide whether all the cries of repressive quotas, premature bankruptcies, depleted stocks, and anti-Irish prejudices could be substantiated. Our determination, however, was somewhat diminished when we realized that the world of mega-hauling is a rather secretive and cautious one where information is exchanged with reluctance and even the occasional drop or two of wile and guile.

  Winks, nods, and knowing—but mainly silent—communication seemed to be the rules of the game. And while we met some of the most delightful people involved in the trade, we still came away sensing that basic truths and solid data continued to elude us.

  PEOPLE LIKE MARGARET DOWNEY were the epitome of graciousness. This warm, cuddly grandmother (with a spine of steel, as we later learned) invited Anne and me over for tea and cakes at her large home set on a prominent seashore site overlooking Bere Island. There she regaled us with tales of her family’s long association with fishing. Following the recent death of her second husband, Frank, she and her son Kevin were now the primary controllers of a huge new 120-foot-long craft, the Sea Spray, which towers over the smaller Beara boats at the nearby harbor. She took us on a tour of this meticulously maintained masterwork of modern navigation. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an engine room quite so clean and gleaming. Ditto the wheelhouse and the crew’s quarters. Eerily spit-and-polished. And yet Margaret insisted that the boat was in regular use “during the quota period” but that no matter how arduous and wave-bashed the latest
voyage might have been, shipshape appearances in port were obligatory.

  As we stood high on the prow of the boat overlooking the square, it was curious—quaint, even—to see in the midst of all this huge high-tech clustering of trawlers, there were still fishermen scattered along the quay mending their nets by hand, as they have done here for centuries. We found this a rather reassuring time-warp glimpse of a far simpler era.

  Through a long family association with the sea, Margaret was familiar with all the sagas—the destruction of the Calf Rock Lighthouse in a terrible storm in 1881; the loss of a large Spanish trawler and all nine of its crew in 1984 just at the entrance to the Bere Channel less than four miles from her house; the enormous financial penalties for “overfishing”; the crazy dodgem car antics of trawlers when they’re all competing to fish the same shoal, and the illegal “beat-the-quota” selling of catches at sea to other international boats.

  “Oh—I’m getting too old for all this,” she said. (We didn’t believe her.) “Especially when I go to the cemetery and realize I know just about everybody in it! Only problem is—when I walk into town, with all our scores of new Polish and Lithuanian immigrants, I hardly know anyone!” (We didn’t believe that either, but we understood her point. Sometimes MacCarthy’s sounded like a Warsaw café and the nearby supermarket boasted a whole section of Polish foods.)

  We asked her about all the dire warnings of shoal elimination. “Lot of nonsense!” she replied emphatically. “There’s still plenty of fish out there, ‘specially mackerel. That’s a real moneymaker. But the quotas keep us back. March to September is our dead time. And I’ve got a crew of eight, and some of them have been with us more than thirty years and then their sons are coming in too, and that’s something you just can’t cast aside lightly.”

  We nodded and I thought I’d test the waters of “truth in information” with Margaret.

  “Well, it must still be worth it. There seems to be good money in it most of the time. One owner told us his boat goes out on three-to five-day-long trips, and he has a capacity of 450 tons, and depending on market conditions, he claims he can bring in around 1,500 euros a ton. So we did the math, and that seemed to top out ’round about 650,000 euros if he’s got a full load. Which doesn’t sound too bad to us!”

  “Well, lucky him!” said Margaret with a twinkle that only half disguised the steely determination and strength of this remarkable woman. “But don’t forget, full catches like that are very rare, plus the fact that the mackerel quota for the whole season for our boat is only 900 tons. On longer fifteen-day trips up toward Iceland you can go for tuna and whatnot if you can get a license. But you’ve always got the government inspectors snooping around. Most don’t know the front end of a boat from the back end. But they’re always trying to fine us—and drive us all out of business. Meanwhile, the Spanish boats seem to do whatever they want. They just use Castletownbere as a place to unload onto trucks bound for Spain.”

  It was obvious that discussing the details of catch prices and the like was not considered polite in these parts. And Margaret was too busy anyway listing all their challenges, such as needing 60,000 gallons of gasoline to fill their 600-ton Sea Spray and decrying the farm salmon industry for “their endless problems with pesticides, sea lice, red dye number 2, chemicals in the blood, spreading diseases and poisoned water which kills wild sea trout and other fish.” She finally returned to the inequities of the quota system—“Oh, Lord,” she grumbled. “I’m so all-at-sea with the quotas!”

  “So are we!” was about the only reply we could give.

  EVEN GRANT FULTON, THE inspector who supervises the quotas and enforcements for the government at the harbor, seemed to have problems clarifying the system for our neophyte understanding. Plus the fact you could tell he was uneasy being seen in public discussing such matters with blow-ins like us. He was a tall, lean young man with humor-filled eyes. And, by absolute coincidence (yes, I know—there are no coincidences), he was also the son of one of our favorite artists on the island of Harris, Willie Fulton, whose work we celebrated in our Seasons on Harris book. They both had that refreshing Pythonesque take on life and all its odd nuances, although in Grant’s case, we sensed his frustration with his job and for the local fishermen.

  “Oh, of course, there’s always some that try to sneak around the rules, but we’re really having a rough time compared to the Spanish and the French—we’re being left the scraps, really. And you never know when a crunch point is reached with any particular species of fish. Like the shrimp on the Grand Banks off Newfoundland. They just vanished. One year you came back with brimming boats, next year—nothing.”

  Grant told us quite a lot more when he and his wife, Gillian, invited us over for dinner at his beautiful home near Adrigole, which he’d built mainly by himself. But it was all essentially “off the record.” So we respect his position and responsibilities and leave it at that. Maybe we understood a little more than we did previously about the fishing industry, but I’m not really convinced. And it still seems to us that the Irish fishermen have been well and truly screwed by the EU—and even by their own government!

  But we were utterly convinced by Gillian’s superb soufflélike Yorkshire pudding that accompanied Grant’s magnificent, perfectly cooked medium-rare standing rib roast. It simply was by far the best pudding we’d had in months—anywhere.

  Gillian, with her research-based Ph.D., described her work with our old friend Jim O’Sullivan to ensure the continuity of his Beara Breifne Greenway, a trail of over six hundred miles commemorating that epic march of Donal Cam O’Sullivan, chief of the O’Sullivan clan, north to Leitrim following his defeat at his Castletownbere home of Dunboy Castle in 1602. More than a thousand followers set out on the march, but after skirmishes and decimating starvation along the way, only thirty-five finally arrived. An amazingly heart-rending—but ultimately inspiring—story.

  Mending Nets by Hand

  And we also found Susan inspiring too. Susan Steele, a doctor of marine biology, is the beautiful, blond-haired, energetic, lean, eloquent, and dynamic daughter of Norman and Veronica, the cheese makers at Eyeries. Her multitasking list of responsibilities for the Irish Sea Fisheries Board and other organizations was utterly mind-boggling.

  The first time we met her down at the harbor, she’d just been given an additional responsibility as agriculture and business training coordinator and was having “a bit of an off day.” Apparently her husband, Andy, had just had a couple of ribs crushed by an ungrateful cow on their small farm off the Allihies Road as he tried to release it from a tangle of fence wire. “If it’d been a bull, he’d be dead!” she said with a beguiling “make the best of it” grin. And apparently she had also just realized that she’d left her purse, wallet, and “Lord knows what else” at a doctor’s office in Cork where she’d had to take one of her children the previous day in an emergency for a “terrible ear infection.”

  Then she remembered that her notes for a lecture she was about to give that afternoon on seaweed farming were also in her purse. Then she’d been told the motor was kaput on an inflatable boat she used to give classes in seamanship and safety at sea. (These were in addition to other classes she gave on kayaking.) Then someone had just told her that a party of twenty Japanese marine biologists had decided to visit her and her offices the following morning and would expect a guided tour, et cetera. And then she’d just been asked if she’d teach a “short fun course on the sea” for elementary school kids—starting next week. And then…

  Enough! Point made. This young woman was a miracle of perpetual motion. A true new female Celtic Tiger restless and roaring to garner even more challenges. And laughing too—always laughing—as, with one of her gorgeous and equally energetic children, she led us around her “sample rooms” filled with scores of different seaweed species, a remarkable array of dead and living sea creatures, and her lecture room teeming with wall charts, more specimens, and copies of her books. (Yes, of course, Susan is an auth
or too.) We were exhausted after an hour with her, but she looked as fresh and frisky as when we’d first met her.

  She invited us up to her farmhouse for “a bit of tea” in the evening, so that’s where we were around 6 P.M., drinking strong Irish-blend tea and selecting from a deluge of her home-baked goodies. Little kidlets flitted about like golden-haired angels. (“Soon as you’ve gone,” Sue said, “they’ll turn back into devils!”) Andy, despite his bandaged ribs, insisted on showing us his extensively hand-built home and various pastures and paddocks on the sloping hillside overlooking Castletownbere.

  In terms of learning more about the fishing industry itself, Sue seemed to agree with much of Margaret’s synopsis. But she did offer one beguiling comment before we left: “Bearans are a bit like bulls. Normally pretty docile—but get us riled up and the bad guys had better start running for the hills—fast!”

  AND RILING TIME MAY indeed be approaching. Like a friendly young fisherman from Cornwall told me at MacCarthy’s one evening, some are ready to let fly: “I can’t tell y’ the real truth about our fishin’. It’s all far too political. It ain’t worth m’life t’tell y’ those stories. They’re unbelievable. But troubles are comin’. So I keep t’m’self. I’ve only got a small boat. Thirty miles out is my maximum—hooking pollock around the reefs and wrecks out there. Many of the boats were sunk by German submarines in World War II, just like the Lusitania was nearby. And I’m doing this all quiet like. Not treadin’ on anybody’s toes. That’s not so good for your health in these parts. But we are losin’ the big fishin’ ’round here. We’ve been really messed up by the EU and our own government. But in the meantime if I keep m’head down I can still make a nice quiet living…”