The last fishermen of Castletownbere?: ‘We are in extinction mode’

“You can’t unsheathe it the whole way or you have to draw blood,” Adrienne McCarthy laughs as she takes her father’s samurai sword from beneath the counter of the lasar she runs in Castletownbere. Over the years, the family heirloom has become one of the more celebrated artefacts in the Co Cork fishing town, connected as it is to Air Commodore Aidan MacCarthy’s traumatic and valorous second World War experience, which took him from Dunkirk to a prisoner-of-war camp in Nagasaki when the atomic bomb vaporised the city.

The MacCarthy family were – and remain – Castletownbere old stock. The pub has been there since 1860. It has changed little: the broad, low-slung counter and the neat division of grocery at the front and alehouse at the back. It’s a gem. Adrienne, raised in England, returned to her father’s town in the late 1970s to run the bar after her uncle – the last family member living there – died. An intrinsic attachment to place made the thought of its sale unbearable. She was a newly qualified nurse and promised herself she would give herself six months.

“That was 43 years ago,” she says on a sleepy, overcast afternoon. Over the decades, she has witnessed many other casual visitors to the peninsula who wandered in for a week’s holiday and never quite managed to leave. “Beara is so magnetic that you have to be careful; it gets the people that it wants. You see people coming and they just see it for a week, and they are saying, ‘Oh, we are looking at houses.’ And you think: Oh no, don’t do that because you haven’t seen the winter yet. It is very strange who it attracts.”

Just getting there requires a twisting, 40-minute drive from Kenmare or two hours from Cork city. The town is nestled and built in to the hills, which provide a winter canopy from the coastal storms, and the main street is dominated by the pier and a panorama of ocean and light which changes hourly. Castletownbere has its returning summer visitors, yes, but fishing has been the lifeblood of the community for three generations. And it’s a body in trouble. The winter population is about 1,200. The local fishing fleet stands at about 45 boats. But up to 15 boats will be decommissioned by their owners this year and the worries in the community have become acute.

Cannes 2024: 12 things you need to know about this year’s film festival

---

Domestic violence is a workplace issue

---

Denis Walsh: Shefflin facing a different challenge as he struggles to solve Galway conundrum

---

“I suppose it was death by a thousand cuts,” Jason Sheehan says from his upstairs office on the harbour. Outside, it’s squally, leaden-skied, and the afternoon holds a children-still-at-school feel. He wears a grey hoodie and a small cut on his nose – a souvenir from a recent fishing trip in the Hebrides. He is one of the younger fishermen in the community. He has five fishing vessels and this marine supply business; the store is big and immaculately kept. It’s an impressive business. But he looks you dead in the eye when he says he would have gone down a different route in life had he known then what he knows now.

“Yeah. A hundred per cent. If I had my time back, there is no way on God’s earthly hour I’d have gone fishing. Now, I have great childhood and teenage memories but the way the job has gone... it is just horrible, like. Every day – and I mean every day – there is a drama. There is somebody on your case about something. Fuel hikes, quota counts, additional red tape, lack of young local men going fishing is a big one. And that boils down to the fact that the money is not in the job any more. If you go back, the money at sea was probably five times what it was on shore. Now it is about even. There was a reward for the effort.

“My age group are out in the mines in Australia. They are not there because they want to be there. It’s because they want to make money.”

Jason’s father began fishing as a teenager, when the community didn’t have the boats or technology; it was a small-scale way of life. The advent of the Castletownbere Fishermen’s Co-Operative Society (co-op), in 1968, began to change things. When Jason was a boy of around 10, fishing in Castletownbere was probably in its golden period. The routine was weekly: all the boats would go out fishing on a Sunday night and they’d return on Friday. Standing on the pier waiting to see his father return became a rite of passage for children of his generation. “You can see right down the channel from the pier. And you might stand there at five in the evening and our boat would be coming in at seven or eight. And it was just a stream of lights coming back. After landing, all that goes with that, you might be finishing up at eight o’clock and heading up for the pier. At the time there were 17 bars in Castletownbere. And they were bursting.”

It’s an evocative image of an irretrievable time in both the town and society in general. For a few years, before the stranglehold of quotas, west of Ireland fishing towns were an anomaly. They were vibrant micro economies during the years of a pronounced national economic depression. Fishing offered school-leavers steady and instant employment. The reliability of the industry birthed spin-off businesses.

“It would be wild at the weekends,” Adrienne MacCarthy recalls of the bar trade in those years. “People just enjoying and spending. There was no shortage of cash. Now, things are so different. Of course, drinking habits have changed since then. But youngsters here don’t want to go into fishing any more. You notice foreign crew around town – and we are glad to have them. But it is just very sad to see what was a family-oriented tradition, that was in everyone’s blood, change. The soul goes out of it in that it is a fishing industry now whereas then it was the life and soul of the community.”

John Nolan is an accidental fish man. He came here more than 40 years ago, swapping ceramics production to come and manage the co-op. Raising a family here was, he says, a blessing. He’s soft-spoken, quick-moving and hospitable and he nibbles a Kit Kat for lunch as he talks through the no-man’s waters of European Union fishing quotas and rights, which he argues have bamboozled Irish fishing in the 50 years since the country joined the EU. And “Brexit broke our will”, he says.

“We are not going shouting and roaring but slipping away slowly but surely.”

“The EU brought [French politician Michel] Barnier in to negotiate the fishing,” he continues wearily, pronouncing Barnier as only a Cork man could, completely filleting all traces of French. He outlines the alarming result from his perspective: the concession of 99.9 per cent of herring fishing in the Irish Sea to Britain. Fifty-two per cent of the cod quota was conceded; 26 per cent of the mackerel.

“Do I know why? When you put the pluses and minuses together, Ireland is paying 40 per cent of the total losses. I can’t understand why we as an island and one of the smallest countries in the EU don’t respect the sea. Surely every country should be carrying a share of the loss. If we can’t get mackerel back, then maybe we could get monk[fish] from France or black sole from the Belgians; species we could have the right go to fish for. So, it would be a real partnership. But the attitude seems to be ah, we can’t get it, so we won’t ask.”

Nolan can talk knowledgeably about the local fishing experience of almost any type of fish. He mentions bluefin tuna, a non-quota species in the 1980s and so plentiful in local waters that one trawler, the Fiona-Patricia, developed a hook-and-line catch and shipped it to Japan. Then, it was made a quota species. Ireland’s percentage was negligible; collectively, Irish fishing boats can keep 200 tonne. Now, Japanese boats arrive to fish “in theory 200 miles outside our coast”.

“But a boat was arrested last week with 100 kilometres of net. We have some very skilled fishermen and things. But can you imagine as a fisherman living in Castletownbere and you see the Japanese boats out there, the Dutch boats out there, the Norwegians, the French, the Spanish… and you can’t go out to sea? That is hard to take.”

Nolan represented the co-op in negotiations to allow owners to decommission their boats: to take them out of the water and have them broken up. He doesn’t want to see the local fleet diminished but he feels compelled to allow his members to exit “with a bit of dignity”.

“I’m like a turkey voting for Christmas,” he says. The agreed price was €12,000 per gross registered tonne – with an average boat weighing 200 tonnes, he says. He argues that the Government has imposed a series of deductions which significantly reduces the actual compensation.

Alan Carlton is now contemplating decommissioning a boat that he bought just nine years ago. The ownership has been dogged with problems; pure bad luck – a belt coming off the engine – caused a near-sinking in 2017 that left the boat out for repairs for seven months. They had just returned to a regular routine when Covid struck. His crew, primarily Spanish, returned home. Then came the fuel hikes. His father started fishing full-time at the age of 13. Alan turned to fishing as soon as he finished school. For a time, father and son fished for tuna together in a boat they bought for that purpose. It was a comparatively carefree time. Now, he is still debating whether the financial compensation for decommissioning his boat makes sense.

“We have to pay back the tie-up money. There’s capital gains tax, which must be paid. And then the bank. You probably have to pay to break up the boat. You have to sit down and work that out. The cost of getting the boat to where you are going. You have redundancy then.”

When he bought the boat, it was with the intention of remaining in the fishing tradition for a long time. But the scene has become unrecognisable in the past few years. Carlton says he can sense the general concern in the town now of what the future holds.

“I’d be fearful. People don’t realise that for every person at sea there is another couple of people at home in the factories, the shops, the metal fabricators, the net repairers.”

Not all families in Castletownbere are fishing families but the tradition has become the defining trait. Artists are drawn to the untamed landscape and easygoing way of life; people are friendly here. There’s a Buddhist retreat a 10-minute drive from the town. The artist Sarah Walker has converted an old abattoir and mackerel house located on the slipway into a wonderful gallery. “At the time my husband was fishing here on the slipway and he spotted it was for sale,” says Walker. “I loved the building itself and it has a gorgeous setting. I think everyone who comes to visit Castletownbere will come to walk on the pier. The boats are an attraction.”

Walker herself did a series called At The Pier – abstract portraits of the boats. “And visiting artists from other countries definitely did work connected to fishing.”

There’s a range of quality, reasonably priced seafood restaurants but increasingly, opening days are seasonal. Sea fishing is a tough job and, as the location of the Coast Guard serves to remind, a dangerous one, too. Castletownbere has had its share of tragedies. Adrienne MacCarthy volunteered on the coastal rescue for 20 years. When the St Gervaise sank, suddenly and in the darkness in November 2000, she found herself searching for the body of the husband of one of her closest friends. There have been times when she has returned to her bar to find the partner of a missing fisherman sitting, nursing a cup of tea, being comforted, waiting for a glimmer of hope. There’s a peculiar resilience attached to such tragedies. Over the years she has lived there, MacCarthy began to realise that the nature of fishing – absenteeism for prolonged periods – meant that the governing atmosphere in the town is matriarchal. In an odd way, one of the most traditional livelihoods facilitated a progressive outlook.

“The women of this town are absolutely amazing,” she says. “They have to be strong. They are the ones who are home rearing the family and coping with that. They’ve got the worry of their husband being out in those weathers. They’ve got the worry then of no fishing when the boats are tied up. Now they’ve got the worries of decommissioning boats. But absolutely – very, very strong females in this town. A lot of the bars are run by women. We have a female bank manager and we had banghardaí here before their day [before it was common].

“The two school principals are women. I just think it is interesting that they take on the roles in this town that are often taken by men.”

There is little activity on the pier on this February midweek. At the moment, prawn fishing accounts for almost 50 per cent of the stock passing through the co-op. Quota restrictions mean that Irish boats often have to literally steam away from rich catches, they say. Speak to skippers and they will bemoan again and again the bureaucratic nightmare of logbooks to be filled before midnight, of the joyless sense of being watched, monitored, and the frustration of seeing foreign boats profiting in Irish waters. Jason Sheehan says that sentimentality can’t come into the decision to decommission a boat. But when he begins to talk of fishing two quick decades ago – with friends, playing cards between hauls and a sense that there was something meaningful behind the hardship and danger – you can hear the attachment in his voice. There is something more at stake than cold commerce. You’ll find plenty of people in Castletownbere who are convinced that local fishing is in its twilight hour.

“They are killing this part of our heritage all around the coastline. Fishing is disappearing from our ports and harbours. We are in extinction mode,” says Patrick Murphy, the head of the Irish South & West Fish Producers’ Organisation. Murphy speaks in the energetic, persuasive vernacular of the locale as he delivers an abbreviated account of a life in fishing, which started when he was eight. He still runs a mussel farm. When he was youngster, in Baltimore in 1988, there were about 30 local fishing vessels. Now, there are three. Look at what has happened along the Cork coastline, he argues. At Union Hall, at Schull, where the local factory once employed 200 people: “Now it’s a fish-and-chip shop.” He laughs as he finds himself praising [Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine] Charlie McConalogue for standing up for Irish interests in the total allowable catch negotiations between the EU and Norway. It felt like a rare moment when their voice was heard, he says.

“I’ve given out about him often enough. You know, Norway was one of the countries that was going to join the EU with us. When they saw what they had to give up in fishing, they said no thanks. Last year, they exported €14 billion worth of fish. We have the same rich fishing grounds as they have. We exported half a billion. Our debt could be wiped out.”

He acknowledges that the price we pay for fish in local shops should be a lot cheaper but offers a bleak forecast of the indigenous Irish fishing industry; of the price of local fish on the iced slabs climbing higher and of fewer and fewer Irish-owned boats; of an inheritance withering.

“People don’t realise the goldmine that we have off our coastline. It is there every year. It is like picking apples off a tree. But instead of us getting it, we are being wiped out and others are coming in and getting it. Ireland catches around 180,000 tonnes of fish – in total. The Norwegians on one species alone want to come in and catch 224,000 tonnes. Think about that. It is not about the fishermen being wiped out. It is every single man, woman and child in Ireland losing this goldmine. And nobody is telling that story.”