Coarse fishing in troubled waters

ANGLING is a strange pastime, surrounded by fashions, conventions and an odd set of laws and bye-laws.

These are mostly designed to make things more difficult for the angler and easier for the fish. If it was just a matter of catching fish as efficiently as possible, a net or explosives would almost certainly be more efficient than a hook.

The regulations and conventions also stretch to what you do with a fish after you’ve caught it.

Today, most anglers in Ireland return coarse fish alive to the water.

Things are different where salmon, trout and sea trout are concerned. Traditionally Irish anglers killed these fish if they were of edible size. Even anglers who didn’t like eating such non-coarse fish killed them and either gave them away or, occasionally, sold them.

Slowly, a culture of ‘catch and release’ is gaining ground among Irish game anglers, a change which probably originated in the United States.

There are changes where coarse fish are concerned as well. Fifty or sixty years ago, in many parts of Ireland, people regularly ate coarse fish.

They had neither access to, nor couldn’t afford, sea fish and game fish, and they were under pressure to eat fish on Fridays and fast days.

The convention of returning coarse fish alive to the water came largely from England, brought in by angling tourists. But, in recent years, a different convention has arrived in the country, largely brought in by immigrants from Eastern Europe who enjoy eating coarse fish.

It seems that in some parts of the country, fish stocks are not able to sustain the new pressures and are declining.

The job of finding a solution to the problem belongs to the Central and Regional Fishery Boards. Their response has been to pass two new bye-laws.

Bye-law number 809 (2006) deals with the conservation of pike and number 806 (2006) with other coarse fish species.

Neither law totally bans the killing of fish, but they do restrict and regulate the number and size of fish that may be killed.

Some people are a bit uneasy about this. They say that there’s no point in passing new laws if they can’t be enforced. And, certainly, Fishery Boards round the country, run down in recent years, don’t have the staff to enforce them.

I ALSO imagine that this sort of enforcement would not be very popular with the gardaí. The whole thing is complicated by the fact that many of the fishermen involved have limited English.

There is another reservation, which has actually been put to me by people who work in inland fisheries. They say that if conventions in angling are changing again, then fishery management methods should adapt to accommodate this.

In other words, if users of our coarse angling amenity now want to kill fish to eat, as previous generations of Irish people did, then we need to re-stock our rivers, lakes and canals so that they can sustain this pressure.

This is all quite difficult. In some ways the arguments are similar to the debates in Britain and France about the clothes Islamic women should or should not be allowed to wear. It’s a debate about whether the host country adapts to the immigrants or whether the immigrants are under an obligation to take on the conventions of their new home.

There is also a reluctance to debate the fishing issues in public. Many people who believe the new bye-laws are correct and a way should be found of enforcing them are keeping their opinions to themselves. Nobody wants to sound like a racist, particularly over such a trivial thing as fishing.

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