Alice’s salmon of knowledge

There’s a revealing story well told by the writer Alice Taylor about the day a neighbour gave a present of a poached salmon to her family. She was a still a child and the fish was taken from a river where she grew up near Newmarket, Co Cork.

Her father lined the family up around their kitchen table and started to cut the fish open. As the eggs poured out, he explained the loss of fish life because that one salmon had been killed illegally. An early lesson that lasted his seven children, who were reared “free as birds”, a lifetime.