Jack Power: Irish salmon are in big trouble

Atlantic salmon populations are in collapse all around their range. Jack Power wonders why we are so indifferent to their imminent extinction

The latest addition to the grim litany detailing the 90% collapse of Irish salmon stocks in less than a lifetime is a report from the Marine Institute that details how escaped farmed salmon have compromised the genetic integrity of the remnants of a once abundant population. File photo

Every obituary — even an ever so slightly premature one — needs a starting point. JW Seigne’s Irish Bogs, published in 1928, offers one for this piece. 

In it he quotes an angler from the Nore who laments that fewer than a dozen 40-pound salmon were taken from the river over the previous season. To give that sorry Rubicon some context the prospect of even one 40-pound salmon turning up in any Irish or British river today is far, far more remote than the reunification of Ireland’s 32 counties.