It will be another year or more before official figures on this year's catches of wild Atlantic salmon become available. At that stage, we will probably have lost a further two generations of this endangered species to bad management, individual greed and official neglect.
The prognosis is terrible. Anecdotal evidence from the main fishing grounds along the west coast suggests a collapse in stock levels. Time is not on our side.
If the new Minister for the Marine is even mildly interested in creating a political reputation, he has the ingredients to hand: an endangered species; gross over-fishing; citizens who are increasingly aware of their environmental heritage. The coincidence of the threat to this noble fish that ranks prominently in our culture and our growing affluence as a society is auspicious. For the first time there is money in the Exchequer to pay for long-term remedial work.
Saving the wild salmon should have particular relevance for voters in Galway West. Any city-dweller there can enjoy the marvellous sight from bridges of salmon waiting to move upstream to Lough Corrib.
The fortunate ones can try their luck with fly, spinner or bait. Tourists and foreign anglers are entranced. It is a window into the past. As a spectacle and a sport it is replicated at the famous Ridge Pool in Ballina, but is rare in the rest of the world. We should go through fire to preserve it.
There are, of course, voting considerations. Since the 1950s many Connemara fishermen have made good money drift-netting for salmon during the summer. The emergence of west coast drift-netters as the main catchers of salmon, and the use of mono-filament nets, saw the gradual decline of shore-based, draft-net fisheries. Salmon were now being caught - often illegally - at sea, while fishing efforts ashore continued unabated. Successive governments turned blind eyes to the ravaging of the stocks.
On the rare occasions the issue did surface on the political radar, it was the votes of the many drift-netters in coastal communities that counted. Fishery owners and anglers took a back seat.
It was a perverse political reaction. And it hasn't gone away. It may reflect old attitudes to the Big House, to the gentry and to a "well-heeled" angling confraternity. A similar "them and us" mentality informed official thinking in the 1960s when some enlightened citizens tried to preserve Georgian Dublin.
In the same way, salmon stocks and inland fisheries are not yet seen as part of our common heritage, to be protected and cherished. But the tide is slowly turning. The gradual change in official attitudes may have more to do with the collapse of salmon stocks than enlightened thinking. Ahead lies the cliff edge. We have only a few short years left to prevent disaster. And the issues involved are complex.
While over-fishing at sea is the primary cause of the collapse of wild salmon stocks, it is not the only factor. Climate change, water pollution of nursery streams, afforestation, extensive poaching and a growing number of rod anglers have all contributed.
Irish drift-nets take about 70 per cent of the recorded salmon catch, worth less than £2 million a year. Most of the 1,200 licensed netsmen and their helpers fish off the west and south coasts and, if anecdotal evidence is to be believed, the salmon fishing was so bad this year that many of them abandoned it for crab and lobster fishing. Catches along the Galway, Mayo and Donegal coasts were said to be about one-third of 1999 levels which were, again, one-third of average catches from the 1970s.
Even then, the shortage of wild fish didn't impact on prices. Irish households are now supplied with low-priced farmed salmon; netsmen only received between £2.10 and £2.50 per pound for wild salmon at the height of their season.
It is such a waste in fishery resource terms. There are so few wild salmon fisheries left that foreign anglers are prepared to pay a great deal to catch fish, even if they have to release them again. Access to salmon fishing for Irish citizens is still relatively cheap and manageable.
Crashing stocks and low prices have made this a zero-sum game for netsmen. Price is dictated by the cost of farmed fish, even as wild stocks decline. Generous Government compensation would, at this point, encourage many of them to give up their licences and would augment the stocks of wild fish coming into the rivers to spawn.
At that point rod anglers, fishery owners and the State would have a responsibility to participate in further conservation and protection measures. For there is no point in phasing out netting if increased stocks are eroded by poaching and by greedy, thoughtless anglers and fishery owners.
A first step in phasing out draft netting was taken by Michael Woods last December when he provided £200,000 to compensate licence-holders on the Munster Blackwater and on the Laune-Lane catchment in Co Kerry. On his appointment as Minister, Mr Fahey asked the National Salmon Commission to oversee the tagging of all wild fish to establish stock levels. But there has been no advance on the drift-net issue.
Tagging as an anti-poaching measure was to have been introduced last April, having been first officially proposed 12 years ago by Brendan Daly. It didn't happen. Now officials are talking about next year. It's a shambles. The greatest mistake, however, lay in the Government's failure to join an international effort aimed at protecting the species.
Ireland and Britain are the only north Atlantic countries that have not moved towards ending drift-netting. The countries close to the feeding grounds - Greenland, Iceland, Norway and the Faroes - have done so. But their fishermen now complain they are conserving stocks only to see them slaughtered by Irish and British netsmen.
Without radical Government action, our wild stock of salmon could disappear within a decade, and both commercial and recreational fishing will be doomed. Determined conservation and protection measures could halt that slide towards disaster. But they will involve pain for all those involved.
For rod anglers, it could mean catch limits, catch-and-release in certain circumstances, and the curtailment of fishing on impoverished waters. Government and anglers will have to fund greater fishery protection measures to combat poaching.
Saving the salmon could form the basis of a positive, forward-looking campaign. We have killed off the char populations of the great western lakes through low-level pollution. Hardly anybody noticed. But we are now investing millions in an attempt to improve the quality of our waters. That investment may relieve ecological stress on salmon and trout stocks. But what will be the point if we wipe the species out through over-fishing?
Frank Fahey doesn't have all the answers in his Department. A comprehensive approach to conservation will require the co-operation and support of Noel Dempsey in Environment, John O'Donoghue in Justice and Joe Walsh in Agriculture. On top of that, Charlie McCreevy in Finance will have to open the purse-strings.
Saving a fish species may seem relatively unimportant in a political climate that has been dominated by agricultural pressure groups. But the wild Atlantic salmon is a special case. Properly managed, a campaign to save that part of our heritage could become a big idea for the Coalition Government. And Frank Fahey could raise his profile.