Fish-war combatants retire bruised

Press, 3 August 1983, Page 11

Fish-war combatants retire bruised

By COLIN McINTYRE, of Reuter (through NZPA) Belmullet, Ireland

Ireland’s salmon war between the Navy and illegal fishermen is over, for this year at least, and both sides are licking their wounds.

In what has become almost an annual confrontation, naval officers checking whether salmon fishermen were obeying the law were abused, rammed, punched, and bombarded with concrete blocks.

They were once forced to open fire when a fishing boat tried to ram a naval boarding party in a rubber dinghy. Five members of a joint Navy-police patrol were taken to a hospital after being brought ashore at Belmullet, a western fishing village, suffering from head injuries, concussion, and

broken ribs.

They had been attacked by fisherman wielding rubber hoses and clubs after boarding an unmarked fishing boat off the County Mayo coast in their search for illegal monofilament nets.

The fine mesh nets are almost invisible, and this, in the view of Irish fishing authorities, gives the salmon too little chance of getting past the boats and up the rivers to spawn. The stakes in the bitter little war appear to be high on both sides.

Using the banned nets some fishermen are reported to be earning up to £ 80,000 ($186,000) a week a boat in the brief six-week netting season which ended in most parts of the country a week ago. The Irish Fisheries De-

partment says that fishermen using the nets pose a grave threat to Ireland’s finest natural resource, the salmon, by preventing it from getting up-river to propagate. As salmon return to the rivers where they were batched to spawn, over-fish-ing off the coash will mean less salmon in Irish waters in two or three years, officials argue. That would not only damage the commercial salmon industry but hit tourism, which relies heavily on foreign anglers drawn by some of the best river and lake fishing in Europe.

The Government cites figures showing that annual salmon catches in Irish waters have dropped from a peak of 2188 tonnes in 1975 to 900 tonnes last year, after only 648 tonnes in 1981.

After studying annual catches and examining spawning grounds in the mid-1970s the Government became so alarmed that in 1979 it introduced tough measures that included shortening the netting season by several weeks. Saying that conservation was in the fishermen’s own interest, the Fisheries Minister, Mr Paddy O’Toole, said in June that he had been forced to call in the Navy, “to save people from themselves.” In the first week of patrols by Navy vessels this year more than 32km of monofilament netting was seized, most of it off the coast of Donegal, north-west Ireland, where the salmon industry is concentrated. The secretary of the Irish Salmon and Trout Conservation Council, Mr Edward

Power, said that most of the illegally-caught salmon had been quietly sold abroad falsely marked as mackerel and sole.

“These men are not poor. It is the fishermen who abide by the law who are suffering as a result,” he said.

Fishermen angrily rejected the Government’s arguments, saying that salmon stocks rose and fell in cycles unaffected by conservation measures. This year there were record amounts available, they said.

The fishermen also denied that they were making huge profits, saying that an average income for the six-week season this year was £l5OO ($3500) a man. The Fisheries Department said that was ludicrous.