Dace have spread their fins

I’ve been fishing in the River Barrow recently and catching quite a lot of dace, writes Dick Warner. 

They’re an interesting fish with an interesting back story. They’re not native to Ireland but, unlike most of our introduced species of freshwater fish, we actually have a lot of information about when and where they arrived and how they spread around the country.

In 1889 a party of English anglers used the mail boat and the newly built railway through Cappoquin to go on a pike fishing holiday on the Munster Blackwater. The speed of the new steam transport system allowed them to bring small, live fish with them from England to use as baits for the predatory pike — this is an illegal method today but it wasn’t at that time. Among the small fish were dace and roach, neither of which had been seen in Ireland before. At the end of their holiday they tipped the left-over baits into the river, where both species thrived.