A Chara, - As a driftnet fisherman, and by the wishes of your recent editorial on salmon conservation, about to be a member of a dead breed, I found your editorial deeply offensive. By writing such a biased article you are compounding inequality in our society, backing the interests of the well-heeled, to the exclusion of the socially disadvantaged in our country.
I live on an offshore island where my own and previous generations depended on the sea for its livelihood. At present the amount of people involved in inshore fishing has dwindled to a handful. Your comment that the changed economic climate has changed the employment opportunities for these peripheral islands and coastal communities and that work is no longer hard to find in these areas is very glib indeed. The only work I see around me are FAS schemes, mostly of road building, and a fickle tourist season. What I see here are an ageing population, closures of schools, post offices, etc., and communities on their knees through emigration and generations of neglect.
The tone of your editorial raises a lot of questions. Are we still suffering from the same mindset that enabled this country to give away its billion-pound fishing industry to our EU partners? Why has this country such a land-locked mentality? How can we have a campaign to save the seal - the one species that is suffering from a population explosion - while at the same time we hasten the demise of a whole community of people? And how are the skills, knowledge and traditions of these communities of fishermen, developed over generations, to be preserved and passed on? It is surely mind-boggling.
You made a just case for the preservation of the wild salmon for future generations. But it was for the sport and recreation of the better-off, not for the more deserving population of the coastal communities that have so little going for them.
Instead of advising the Minister to give us, the licence holders, a few miserable pounds to pay us off, your editorial should be calling on the Minister to invest real money upgrading our skills and knowledge and the fishing infrastructure of these neglected coastal communities. Such an investment might go a small way to compensate for the generations of neglect. - Is mise,
Peadar O'Conghaile, Inis Oirr Aran Islands.