Summer’s bounty of mackerel proves elusive

MY PAL, a sprightly walker and fisherman who has moved to Spain, got a bit of a land when he flew into Dublin Airport and went to rent a car.

He had seven days ahead of him in Ireland. He’d head for the West right away, walk the Maamturks in Connemara and spend days fishing mackerel off the coast of Clare.

Touching down in Dublin about 6pm, he planned to drive to Athlone where he’d overnight and have dinner at a Shannon-side restaurant. However, his schedule bit the dust when he presented his driving license, Irish and valid until 2016, at a car rental desk.

“Can I see your doctor’s letter, sir?” the rental man asked. “Doctor’s letter?”, my pal replied, “But this license was issued on the basis of a doctor’s letter. Why do I need another letter now?”

The man was sympathetic. “It’s not us, it’s our insurers. You’re 75 so they want a recent all-clear from your doctor, and confirmation from your insurers that you are five years accident free.”

To his dismay, my pal was also refused at other car rental desks. The upshot was that he had to spend the night in Dublin, seek a doctor the following morning and phone his Spanish insurance company to email him the required confirmation in English.

A day of his brief holiday would be lost and stressful, simply trying to rent a car. It was hardly a warm welcome to Ireland, but, in the event, his friends in Dublin kindly lent him their second car.

Insurers, it seems, increasingly dictate the terms and conditions under which we live our lives. Playgrounds have been closed because insurers refuse to take on the risk of children hurting themselves. Public amenities — walking routes, swimming pools, sports grounds —have to shut down when insurance premiums rocket.

Farmers, as I said last week, are warned by insurers that claims may not be paid if an accident occurs on a stretch of road hedged by their property. The solution is to spray Roundup on the verges and cut the hedges to the quick, annihilating the last refuge of insect and wildlife that can no longer find sustenance or shelter in the monoculture grasslands.

Recently, I heard of a roadside forest felled because an insurance company refused to insure the holding if the trees remained.

When one insurance company demands new conditions, others follow. Or so it appeared at the car rental desks. Insurance companies, we know, are floated by investors, not as a public service but as for-profit enterprises. The “Names” at Lloyd’s are not in it for the good of their health, or ours. India is the only example I can find of nationalised general insurance. Yet a nationalised, non-profit public-interest insurance company would keep premiums down and insure amenities.

My pal had a good holiday anyway, but few mackerel did he land.

“Were they overfished?” he asked me. The tradition of summers of plenty with the silvery, blue-striped fish, their eyes bright and skin shimmering, hoisted dancing on the feathers onto piers, rocks or boat decks, seemed, he said, like a memory.

Could they, indeed, have been ‘fished out’? Was this annual bounty stolen from the coastal dweller or holidaymaker by mega-trawlers with mortgages as big as those of Celtic Tiger houses or, even, monster boats like the Atlantic Dawn (now the Annelies Ilena), a vast, 144m-long sea-sweeper that hauls aboard 400 tonnes of fish per day?

It was licensed to rape the local and West African seas by the intervention of the clever Mr Ahern who arranged that it be registered as a merchant ship, not part of Ireland’s fishing fleet and thus given a series of short-term fishing licenses. Another Ahern “error” that is irreversible.

If the average mackerel weighs 225g, the Atlantic Dawn could vacuum 1.8m mackerel from the sea every day, seven days a week, and accommodate 7,000 tonnes, over 31m fish, before landing.

The boat roams the world and such excessive catches are often taken from the seas of marginal nations, leaving local fishermen impoverished. Indeed, piracy in the Arabian Sea was initially motivated by the desperation of Somalia fishermen whose stock had been plundered by super-trawlers.

Their families were half-starved because their staff of life had been pirated from them by richer nations sweeping the bounty of their local seas onto European and Japanese dinner plates.

Maybe the mackerel will yet come shoaling up the bay this summer. “They’re late, that’s all,” a skipper tells me. Perhaps, he’s right. Tonight, he struck fish, he said.