Cork: O’Connor’s Seafood Restaurant

O’Connor’s Seafood Restaurant, Wolfe Tone Square, Bantry, Co Cork, a local favourite and well worth visiting — especially for the cod dish if you’re from Newfoundland. Picture: Denis Minihane

IN HIS wonderful, challenging 1997 book Cod, A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World, Mark Kurlansky describes an abundance now unimaginable and he tells of how our self-destructive greed overwhelmed one of nature’s greatest gifts. Kurlansky also describes how the cod fisheries of the North Atlantic’s Grand Banks were once cornerstones of economic and social development on two continents. Think of George Clooney skippering the Andrea Gail but refusing to accept the inevitable in Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm and you’re there.