If you see on the menu "salmon trout" you assume it's sea trout, or white trout, as anglers call it. The best of fish to eat; but you don't get sea trout or white trout. Turn it over and look at the purple streak down its back. It's rainbow trout: good stuff when well reared, but it often tastes of mud, rather than the sea. For sea trout are almost extinct. It is as near as dammit sure that we will dawdle along refusing to believe our eyes that the main - almost the only - cause of this is the ferocious onslaught of sea lice from salmon farms that kill the young fish. For salmon farms are usually placed at or near the mouths of rivers into which this fish swims to spawn.
Anglers will tell you of the young smolts going down to the sea, only to be found dying, half of their heads eaten, and continuing to be eaten, by clusters of clinging sea lice. We have committees and officials, and just concerned anglers, who hate to see one wonderful aspect of Irish wild life extinguished for lack of concern - concern that this State is allowing a unique species of fish to perish. Many people mourn the fate of the corncrake, and it is possible that much of the cause behind this lies in Africa on its flight-path to Europe. But in the case of the sea trout, the fault is largely our own.
In the 1950s and 1960s an angler in Connemara used to send to his family in Dublin regular consignments, neatly wrapped in rushes, of sea trout, starting with the first floods of July. Fourpounders, three pounders, two-pounders in such number that the sender, being a good angler and almost by definition, then, a good ecologist and patriot, left the smaller fish to reproduce themselves. Half a lifetime ago, and yet on that river system there is hardly one of these fish coming upstream.
It has to be acknowledged that increasing pollution from over-fertilisation of land, or slurry of one kind or another, can add to the toll. In spite of all our foreign advertising about green Ireland, we have not escaped the modern curses. There is one possible solution, suggested in a letter to the Field. Open sea farming. Move the lice out a mile or two. That is, move the salmon farms, which give employment and also (and no one denies this) give good, nutritious food at reasonable rates. Is there scope for funding such a move from the EU? After all, writes the correspondent, it is a European problem. And a black mark against successive governments. Y