Sir, - The parallel between Chicken Licken and the SOS anti-fish-farm lobby is truly remarkable. For 10 years now the sky has been falling on this small group of blinkered individuals who have been digging a defensive ideological bunker so deep that they cannot appreciate the insensitivity of comparing a seriously human health issue (tobacco and cancer, The Irish Times, August 1st) with a tenuous, unscientific and unproven theory about a stock of wild fish which has never even been properly counted. This year we had to wait until the official start of the media "silly season" for SOS to leave the traps screaming about the collapse of the firmament in the shape of an alleged sea trout decline.
I would like for once to see the headline "Healthy Sea Trout Stocks" above a letter in your pages, because it is a true and accurate reflection of the 1998 situation in rivers adjacent to and far from fish farms. A perusal of local newspaper notes and the specialist angling press will show that, in a far from perfect angling season, sea trout catches are up in most Irish rivers - including those close to salmon farms. Interestingly, anglers and officials in Northern Ireland, where only one small salmon farm is operated, are hailing 1998 as a continuation of the 1997 improvement in sea trout after a long period of poor returns.
Of course, if you were to listen to a lobby group like SOS which is propping up a legal case for compensation against salmon farms and the State through the spread of misinformation and the support of a legal slush fund, you might not hear any good news about sea trout. Instead you might get the desperate and nauseating comparison of this unproven and strongly contested theory about sea trout with the real suffering caused by linkages between smoking and cancer. Or you might hear from the same group that the unproven "collapse" in trout stocks is in fact "Ireland's greatest environmental disaster". The matter of a potato famine killing over 1 million people pales into insignificance when a blinkered lobby group can smell compensation.
SOS members are annoyed that the Central Fisheries Board cannot bring itself to ignore the facts built up over 10 years of looking at this issue. They would much prefer the CFB and the Department of Marine and Natural Resources to throw away the evidence and fully back their case against salmon farmers. In truth, for many years, angler-friendly Government agencies such as the CFB bent over backwards to try to pin any provable sea trout decline on the salmon farming industry. But they failed to find a link.
Healthy trout stocks, a developing Irish aquaculture industry, a complete lack of evidence to prove their case, better monitoring of wild stocks through electronic counters, a new regulatory system which will take an independent view of fish farm licensing - the sky is really falling on SOS, as reality finally dawns on the sea trout issue. - Yours, etc., Richard Flynn,
Executive Secretary, IFA Fish Farming Section,
Bluebell,
Dublin 12.