Drift-net ban was the only option

IT was July, probably around the mid to late 1970s. My mother piled us children into the car, drove down to the pier in An Spidéal in Galway to buy a few freshly caught salmon from the trawlers and half-deckers as they returned.

There was a small huddle on the pier; a guy from the fisherman’s co-op, a couple of hangers on, buyers, other fishermen.

The crates landed on the pier were many and all were rammed with salmon, so much bigger than the mackerel we were used to from fishing off the rocks.

Then, there was a moment of high drama. One of the fishermen realised that a good deal of his catch had been predated by seals. He danced angrily on the pier flapping his arms, shouting in Irish for a rifle to shoot the culprits, which had followed the boats in almost to the pier.

You could see their bobbing heads a little way out from shore. Of course, there was no rifle and “an fear feargach” could do no more than roar and curse at the predators.

At the time, what struck you was the huge bounty, how it seemed the waters of the bay and the Atlantic beyond were teeming with fish.

Much later you realised how far off the mark that would be. And you realised also that the worst predator of all wasn’t the cluster of seals but the guy hopping about on the pier looking for a rifle.

One of the slides used by the Independent Salmon Group — in its presentation this week to the Oireachtas Communications and Marine Committee — showed that this period (the mid to late 1970s) was the heyday of drift-net fishing for salmon in Ireland.

The introduction of new technologies (especially the monofilament net) saw it overtake drift-net fishing as the primary commercial fishing method at the start of that decade. In 1974 and 1975, over 1,400 tonnes were recorded as having been landed each year.

But, sadly, the good times were to end there.

Thirty years later, the average number of returning salmon to Irish waterways was 200,000, one-seventh of what it had been in 1975. The scientific evidence was unvarnished. We were facing a catastrophic decline in salmon stocks.

The Government decision this week to ban drift-net fishing wasn’t just the correct one; it was unavoidable. Minister for Communications, Marine and Natural Resources Noel Dempsey has won much political credit for holding the line, but there really wasn’t a choice (in fact, even that drastic remedy may have come a decade or more too late).

There were no winners either. There was lots of talk about standing up to the fishing lobby but it wasn’t the powerful one portrayed in some quarters.

Salmon netsmen were as far removed as you could get on the feeding chain from the pelagic fleet, with its industrial-sized super trawlers. Only three of the 877 licence holders caught more than 1,000 fish annually, giving them an income that averaged a little over €25,000.

And over half of the licence holders made as little as €500 per year. It was a seasonal and part-time occupation, giving a marginal income boost in coastal communities.

The decline in salmon stocks has been shocking. But it is symptomatic of a much larger and devastating problem. It was all brought home yesterday by a report published in Science magazine by an international group of experts.

They warned that fish stocks in all the world’s oceans could be wiped out by 2050. They found stocks have collapsed in a third of the world’s fisheries and the decline is accelerating.

The reason is a simple one: over-fishing. There has been a huge increase in consumer demand for fish and that has been met by a huge fishing industry using modern technology — sonars, GPS systems, echo sounders, sea-mapping software — to harvest fish on a rapacious scale. Bigger boats and new technology are chasing fewer fish — the global catch fell by 13% between 1994 and 2003.

British journalist Charles Clover’s seminal book The End of the Line brilliantly describes the pillaging of our oceans — as he puts it, a “mining” of the seas on an industrial scale. Huge trawlers from Europe travel from our exhausted waters to Africa and beyond to deplete their stocks.

Irish boats have been as guilty as others of over-fishing for years, both in our waters and further afield.

Unfortunately, too few other developed countries are likely to follow Noel Dempsey’s lead in taking such decisive action.