This also concerns people who may abhor angling and who don't know a salmon from a perch. It relates to the simple fact that we have allowed what the European Union designated the number one trout lake in the whole of the Community, Lough Corrib, to decline into a stretch of water polluted by effluent from silage, from slurry and from human sewage imperfectly treated. Steps to remedy the situation should have been taken ten years ago, it is said. Despite much talk from Ministerial level about the dangers of phosphate and nitrate levels, a new report tells us, or claims, there is no overall state policy to counteract the widespread rise in the pollution of our waterways.
Lough Corrib is a high profile example, but there are scores of lovely little lakes and rivers which have fallen prey to our new assaults on nature. There are rivers which used to cream over with lovely white/yellow flowers, carpets of them, in summer. Now the ranunculus has been wiped out by the same ingredients. There is often only a bare reminder in the long, waving tresses, some times up to ten or twelve feet long, of the occasional plant - but no flowers. And some of this is quite recent. One group, after their river had been drained over a decade ago, sought out a river which still held this lovely plant. Care fully and under proper advice they transplanted the roots, bound in cloth, and with healthy soil, to the bare river bed. It flourished for a few years. But agriculture was advancing. Soon the ranunculus was gone again. "Nature will turn on us yet," said a friend recently on the same subject. "We have already got it in BSE." What will come from the neglect and poisoning of our rivers? In this same river, trout have never been so small. Our friend says the invertebrates and other life on which the trout feed, are seriously depleted. This is a smallish river in whose large pools children used to swim in summer. Not now, for a long time. Come out smelling of slurry. No thanks.
What the remedy is, will no doubt be debated nationally after that Lough Corrib report. More power to the Central and other Fisheries Boards? More encouragement to country councils to be toughminded in raising money for sewage and pollution control? More response and action from the Government? But above all, a bit more pride in ourselves all, and a lot, a lot, more respect for the country we live in.