IT is, of course, irritating that the men and women of our naval and air sea rescue services must risk their lives to assist Spanish deep sea trawlers whose skippers have ignored weather warnings in order to fish. It is, of course, irritating that the Spanish have these far vaster vessels than we have. It is of course irritating that the Spanish are able to fish in our waters using the Irish flag as a flag of convenience. It is, of course, irritating to see our Government do so little to police our waters and punish pirates.
And it is far worse than irritating to count the Irish deaths to date - Seaman Michael Quinn, who lost in his life trying to assist a Spanish "flagship" which had put to sea despite a gale warning and which had already been arrested six times.
Who is to blame? Well, one thing is certain: not the Spanish.
The net investment
If we do not build big trawlers, we cannot blame the Spanish for doing so. They want to. We don't. They invest vast amounts in their great oceangoing trawlers because there is a market at home for the fish which they catch. And we do not build great trawlers either because our fishing industry lacks the enterprise and the courage to make such investments, or there is simply not the market for fish in Ireland to justify that investment.
What other reason could there be for our fisheries being so puny? Why else is our Government so profoundly uninterested in the sea?
Geographically, we are a maritime nation, with thousands of miles of coastline culturally we seem to reside somewhere east of Hungary. Other maritime nations of the Atlantic seaboard have developed great fishing fleets and a vast fish cuisine. From the Baltic down to Ghana, saltwater fish are not merely a huge part of people's diet, they are a vital part of their folklore and identity too.
The Dutch gave us their words to reflect their eminence - "schooner" and "skipper" and "skiff" and many others. The Norwegians have gone to sea in repeated waves from the late Dark Ages onwards, building in the last century the basis for a shipping industry which is still one of the largest in the world. The English established a maritime empire which circled the world and created empires in its farthest corners. Algerians and Moroccans - traded the length of West Africa.
The Portuguese and the Spanish fished the seas in order to eat, and 500 years ago made the Atlantic theirs; and their maritime empire, the vastest contiguous cultural entity in the world, still stretches from Cape Horn to Newfoundland and the icefloes of the Arctic, and from Castletownbere to Ceuta in North Africa and to the waters of the South Atlantic. The British and then the Americans interrupted that sovereignty for a couple of centuries only. The Atlantic is once again an Iberian lake.
Only the Celtic nations seemed largely indifferent to the sea. English laws might have limited English markets for Irish fish they did not prevent Irish vessels going to sea. The Penal Laws did not inhibit commercial activity of any kind; and after the Union, there was not even a bar on the English market, yet still Irish seas washed unfished on the shores of a Famine isle.
Ignored the sea
There was simply no great will to go to sea. Brendan is not the prototype Irish navigator; he is the exception. The Icelandics were a far more adventurously maritime people than we, spreading their nets across the North Atlantic, while our ancestors went on cattle raids and almost totally ignored the sea as a source of protein, regarding even salmon with a classical pastoral contempt.
If it did not have hooves, we didn't eat it. How many of our coastal communities for centuries disdained fish as a food? How many riverbank settlements scorned carp and eel and pike as nourishment? And how many people on our western seaboards today, who condemn the Spanish for trawling Irish waters (which would otherwise go largely untrawled), eat one tenth the amount of fish in a year of an average citizen of Madrid, 200 miles from the sea and 2,000 feet above its level?
The truth is that the Spanish want the fish of the Atlantic, and are prepared to go to great lengths to get it. We do not and we are not. The Spanish negotiated the rights to fish certain quotas, with the consent of our own Government, and then they found European law permitted them to use other people's quotas. They do this lawfully, and by no more deviousness than we use in calculating headage payments for cattle or sheep.
If there are rogue Spanish fishermen - it is more than possible: I am told that there are examples of roguery in our beef industry - then it is our job to enforce the law on lawbreakers. We do not, because we have not the political will.
Our Naval Service is so short of personnel that only five per cent of the foreign owned flagships are searched in a year; are we surprised then that there is overfishing? Cut back the Garda presence in the centre of Dublin, and observe the result. Allow the Naval Service responsible for policing vast areas of ocean to run down, and what do you see? An epidemic of lawlessness, led by the hungriest; and the hungriest are the Spanish. That's not Spanish nature at work, that's human nature, and has been since Eden.
We wave them on
If you go out for the night and you leave your doors and windows open, don't be surprised on your return to find the safe opened and the family heirlooms gone. So it is with seas. If certain Spanish trawlers under record their catches by 1,000 per cent in our waters which we simply cannot be bothered to lockup properly or police efficiently, we shouldn't even astonished or even aggrieved.
We have the second largest sea area in the community, with a fisheries protection capacity barely larger than Luxembourg's. Each year, £2 billion worth of fish are taken from our seas by foreign fishermen, showing more enterprise, initiative and daring than we do. Good luck to them.