Views of Ireland you won't have seen before

IT TOOK THIS winter to make a proper fjord (with Norway’s “j”) of Killary Harbour, the sea’s rift between Galway and Mayo, with snow lying from the mountain summits to the rocky water’s edge. But even in its usual rough livery it remains one of Ireland’s last wild places, its grand scale in no way diminished by the lines of floating barrels dangling mussels for this month’s harvesting. Indeed, one has to wonder why, as a “harbour”, it never really lived up to its name.

True, there’s the twin-hulled cruiser for tourists, moored for the winter at the sheltery end, and the summer ritual of draft-net fishing for salmon by a few encircling currachs. But a harbour, to me, means lots of big boats, fishing trawlers coming and going throughout the year.

Killary's fishery heyday, such as it was, is conjured in a classic image made before the Famine: the fjord's calm inner waters bustling with the currachs and yawls of local fishermen. It is one of many telling illustrations in Troubled Waters: A Social and Cultural History of Ireland's Sea Fisheries(Four Courts Press, €55).

The political geographer and social scientist Dr Jim Mac Laughlin, lately retired from lecturing at University College Cork, describes himself online as “a lifelong ‘leftie’ and natural-born anarchist”. All his books are concerned with the exclusion of particular groups from national and global societies, and in this one he deals with the fishermen of Ireland, victims often of geographic circumstance but also of colonial and domestic politics, the rise of a land-obsessed nationalism and a failure to produce its own leaders.

It’s a fascinating, fact-packed read, from the hunter-gathers on Stone Age shores through the Newfoundland adventures of Waterford’s cod fishermen to a final betrayal of their calling at the birth of an Irish Free State. True, Arthur Griffith preached that sea fisheries could make jobs for 100,000 people, but his voice was unique in a nation conditioned by the “rural fundamentalism” asserted by Mac Laughlin. “As a social group,” he writes, “fishermen had no claim on Irish land, or on Irish history.”

His book fills a remarkable gap in the national story, complementing the maritime passions of another committed socialist, the late John de Courcy Ireland. What gives it a special intellectual salting is in seeking fateful causes beyond the usual matrix of colonialism. Ireland’s nationalism, it argues, was not only farmer-centred but also tainted by 19th-century ideas of “social Darwinism” in which poverty-stricken groups were to be written off as failures. In the “peripheralisation” of coastal Ireland the fishermen of the west were seen as “steeped in ribaldry and clinging to their own plebeian culture”, and not worth bothering with.

The book is also memorable, inevitably, for its long witness to an ocean still packed with big fish, both off Newfoundland and around Ireland – heroic catches of cod, hake, herring and the rest, amost sinking the vessels that netted them.

Now, to browse on the revelatory maps of the new Atlas of the Deep-Water Seabed: Ireland(Springer, €79.99) is to hope they won't be too much help in extinguishing what's left of the wild fish in the sea.

This slim but remarkable book results from one outstanding investment of our affluent years, the sonar mapping of Ireland’s share of the northeast Atlantic seabed, extending to nearly 1,000km off the west coast of the island and more than nine times its size.

The inspiration for the atlas came from a project to find all the cold-water coral reefs in the deeps off Ireland, those on the far scarp of the Rockall Trough being possibly the world’s biggest. To “look down” on these with such precision is like flying over a Technicolor moon, while close-ups taken by remotely operated vehicles inspect their coral, their crabs and fishes startled by light.

But the Irish National Seabed Survey also mapped the great southwestern canyons that emptied the glacial sediments of northern Europe on to the Atlantic’s abyssal plain, and the deep channels of submarine rivers meandering through a world of often fiercely shifting currents. Other maps show “plough marks” on the seabed left by grounded icebergs in past ice ages. Even with a sea level some 120m lower than today, one scar on a slope of the Rockall Bank conjures an iceberg more than 514m tall.

The somewhat stunning price of the atlas seems at odds with its extremely readable and lively text, deliberately accessible to anyone and full of the enthusiasm of its four scientific authors, Boris Dorschel, Andrew Wheeler, Xavier Monteys and Koen Verbruggen, two from UCC and two from the Geological Survey of Ireland (from which you can order the book online: gsi.ie).

For an excellent image of their territory, go to “The Real Map of Ireland” on Infomar.ie, the website of the subsequent inshore mapping project of the GSI and the Marine Institute.

Eye on nature:

I have wanted all my life to see a tree sparrow, and on New Year's Eve three of them arrived at our hanging feeders, attacking them with gusto. Have they fled from across the sea? It has become the 75th bird species seen around our house. Kieran Fitzpatrick, Greystones, Co Wicklow

Tree sparrows are scarce but widespread residents, found in areas near the east and west coasts on open farmland.

We had a red admiral butterfly flying around the Christmas dinner table.Darinagh Doran-O'Reilly, Kilteel, Co Kildare

The warmth in the room brought it out of hibernation. Now we know that at least one red admiral remained to overwinter in Ireland.

While stopped at the weir on the Dodder beside Orwell Road we saw three otters come down the river, come up on the bank, then take the small culvert along the weir to continue their journey downriver.Michael D'Arcy, Dublin 6

In the first week in December a large flock of lapwings arrived here inland from the beach, pecking around for worms and insects as the snow thawed.Neasa Uí Raghnaigh, Carne, Co Wexford

They were immigrants from Britain and the Continent.

Michael Viney welcomes observations at Thallabawn, Carrowniskey PO, Westport, Co Mayo, e-mail viney@anu.ie. Please include a postal address