Sometimes a little story almost captures the essence of where we are as a people.
Such an example was a report in yesterday’s Irish Independent about a man from Trim, who is named in other outlets but I see no need to, who was fined €40 at Cahirciveen District Court on June 8. He was also ordered to pay €200 costs and had some of his property seized.
His offence? Well, last August 2022, the chap in question was pinched while in the process of fishing in the waters off the Blasket Islands. His boat had been boarded by officers from Inland Fisheries Ireland and he was found to be in possession of “specialist gear including spreader bars, squid lures and game fishing reels” for the purposes of catching bluefin tuna.
The fishing feds were more than pleased with themselves as bluefin tuna are an “important species …protected from illegal fishing.” The said attempt to plunder the waters off Kerry having being foiled by an “intelligence led operation.”
That sounds to me that your man had probably let it slip to the wrong person over a few pints that he was planning to head out of Valentia the next day to catch a few tuna.
All very well and good you might say. No one should be catching protected bluefin tuna in Irish waters. Except, you see, that is not what is meant exactly by protecting bluefin tuna in Irish waters. What it really means is protecting bluefin tuna in Irish waters from Irish fishermen or women or binary fluid fisherpersons in Irish waters.
For, you see, lots of commercial fishing boats from other countries catch bluefin tuna in Irish waters and not just our dear, dear friends from the EU. Oh no.
Norwegian boats which have a total quota of more than 380 tonnes can catch bluefin tuna in “our” waters, as can British vessels even after being cast beyond the loving embrace of Brussels. The Brits with over 60 tonnes for the next two years have a better fishing deal outside the EU than Ireland does in it.
Countries which have part of the more than 20,000 tonne EU bluefin quota include Croatia, Spain. Cyprus, Italy, Greece, Malta and Portugal. Also among those taking this fish – for which a lad from Trim can end up in court and have his fishing gear taken off him for – are trawlers all the way from the Land of the Rising Sun. Bluefin tuna, some of which can weigh up to 900lb, is wildly popular amongst Japanese connoisseurs, with the delicious fish fetching up to tens of thousands of Euro.
€80,000 in one case, in fact. So, far too good now for Paddy and Patsy, and especially far too good for Paddy and Patsy fisherpersons to be catching.
And if that reminds you of stories you might have heard of the Relics of Oul Dacency taking plump salmon and trout from the Corrib and the Moy while the local peasants lived on milk and potatoes and might be sent to prison for “poaching” one their Lardship’s fish, then so it should.
And of course all the settler landlords and their friends not only had the free run of the salmon and trout rivers, but were well attended by native gillies to show them where best to catch the fish and ply them with whiskey and ham sandwiches. And other natives to sneak around and catch less fortunate natives who might have dared “steal” one of their Lordship’s fish from a river that might have run at the bottom of their half an acre and that the landlord saw maybe three times a year. And other natives in uniform to kick their cabin door down and haul them off to Galway Gaol to be fed pig slops by other natives with a crown on their hats if they were caught.
All that is long gone of course. Now we just have fishery officers and a navy who seem strangely efficient at catching lads in Rosslare and Daingean and Killybegs but oblivious to foreign trawlers the size of your road hoovering up fish a few miles off the coast.
And we have Ministers who go begging every year for a few crumbs off the EU divvying up of quota in Irish waters only to come back with a kick up the arse and maybe a few more Euro to tempt our own fisherpersons to literally burn their boats and give up the oul nonsense of catching fish in fishing grounds they can see from their back window.
When questioned in 2019 about the ban on Irish fishermen catching bluefin tuna in Irish waters Minister Charlie McConalogue said that allowing this to happen would involved “reducing the shares” of other EU states. How sad is that? The only tuna that can be caught are those inadvertently netted and allowed under a tiny “by catch” concession to prevent fish being thrown back. And even these have to be logged so that the bosses in Brussels know what the Boys from Killybegs are at.
Last December, McConalogue said that he was going to Brussels to ask the bosses for a share of the bluefin quota but they told him to take a hike. Most pathetically of all the Brits – who our sham elite were thumbing their noses at because they’d like gone on their Tobler and “left Europe” – were, at the same time as our satraps were being told to go away and stop annoying them by their “friends”, given an extra 15 tonnes of bluefin quota, much of which will be caught in the waters off Ireland.
The increased quota, which has doubled since over a decade ago, obviously contradicts the whole narrative that some boy from Trim with a game fishing rig is endangering a protected species. McConalogue himself in response to a Dáil question referred to “the abundance of Bluefin Tuna in our waters.”
As I say, sometimes a little story tells you a lot about where we are. But, as devotees of the re-runs of The Irish RM will know, if you are either one of the natives who licks their arse, or are cunning enough to let them make you think that you are pulling the wool over their eyes by some petty scam, then you will thrive. Top of the Morning to you, Sir…