Ireland complicit in Senegal ‘madness’

Damien Enright on our Christian conscience.

TO MAKE provision for our children is a basic instinct. But these days, in making material provision for them, we sometimes destroy the planet they will inherit. We give with one hand, and take with the other. While they could do with less and survive, what we take away is irrecoverable, and without it they cannot survive. If we continue the rape of the planet, the truth is that the sins of the fathers will surely be visited on the children.

In the matter of protecting the Irish environment, we have turned a blind eye to lack of water treatment a laissez-faire approach to waste management and to encroachment on important habitat. We are complicit in the planning outrages all over the country, ditches torn out, bogs drained, slurry from massive pig units polluting the air and running into streams and rivers, raw sewage running into bays. Money is squandered on voting machines and toll road deals. Meanwhile, the health service is among Europe’s worst, the roads and transport system are pathetic and Ireland has the second-lowest percentage of protected wild habitat in the EU.

However, there are fellow humans whose plight is much worse than ours and whose resource we Europeans, with Christian consciences, etcetera, continue to pillage on a daily basis.

Last week, on the ever-excellent TG4, I watched a programme about Senegalese fishermen, and what our EU wealth is doing to them. Africa is, once again, being raped by Europe. Now that we have given back the land, we take the seas. Local chiefs are paid off, as in the Slave Trade days when they sold their own people. The EU pays for fishing rights off Senegal; the EU minister sanctimoniously trots out the figures, 18 million in Aid, two million for fishing rights. Meanwhile, we see the fishermen cast their nets and catch no fish. We hear the spokesman for the fishing village tell us that not a single penny filters down to them. The EU bureaucrats know this. They also know the once-sustainable communities along the coast of Senegal are already in their death throes and we are hastening their death.

Since the EU boats arrived, all the big fish are gone. More than 20 familiar species are now never caught. As one man said, the fish they caught were big as a man; now the biggest is as big as a man’s hand. Villages of fishermen, grandfathers, fathers, and children remembered the fish they landed until a few years ago, gilthead bream, bass, and so on. Now, only the cheapest, smallest fish remain.

In these communities we saw no cars or TV masts, but many children. The village boats were wooden, long, narrow pirogues, open to the elements, with no superstructure or decks. As night fell, the men set out for the deep sea, the raw Atlantic, where it is cold and dark. The only lights are flashlights or lanterns. The French film-makers accompanied a boat of eight men on a night’s fishing. They caught 22 boxes of sardines. For these, they got €22. The diesel cost €35. Meanwhile, huge EU boats bobbed on the horizon, industrial units working day and night, filling their holds.

Aboard, is every kind of navigational aid, fish-finder and bottom-filming equipment, in duplicate. . Areas which were previously too dangerous to fish, where fish could find refuge and reproduce, can now be harvested. The fish have no hiding place.

The EU takes 50% of all fish caught in Senegalese waters. The Irish-owned Atlantic Dawn, a EU boat, can hoover up and freeze 400 tons of fish a day. The coastal communities take the rest, divided between tens of thousands of families. All that is left are the smallest and least commercial inshore fish; and these, now suffering from overfishing, are also disappearing.

But worse is to come. The hinterland of Senegal is drying out, desertification is increasing and the population is moving towards the coast, the last resource left.

Soon, this resource will also be gone and massive human tragedy will ensue. We in Europe, having taken that very resource, will supply aid to a proud and brave people whom we have condemned to poverty despair. We have stolen their heritage, knowingly bought it from governments we know have sold out their people. Ireland will send aid, and we may even feel good about it.

We can now map every nuance of the sea bed. We can use our technology to farm it, not to rape it. With the Greens sharing in Government, let Ireland’s complicity in this madness stop.