"Have you noticed," writes Arthur Reynolds, former Irish Times man, former director of BIM, Bord Iascaigh Mhara, "that one rarely sees the humble herring these days? This was the fish that was most common in Irish seafood diet in the last century, when carts called `jolters' used to collect the herring in the ports and sell it with loose salt to farms and towns inland?" Indeed some old-timers (very old) will remember when a fish-man came round, often without a cart, to urban dwellers with a huge basket of herring and mackerel on his arm. (Maybe, on reflection, the cart was around the corner.)
And what happened to kippers for breakfast? Ousted by bacon and eggs? Or more likely cereal - or just a cup of coffee for the busy office worker? And a good deal of the decline of herring, says Arthur, is due to public taste for other fish which BIM actively promotes. (Also, maybe, due to the boniness of herrings?) The new, prosperous Ireland now goes for such as monkfish (very good, quite dear), turbot, halibut, huge flatfish such as black sole, prawns, cod, and, of course, shrimp. Over all, we export a lot of fish, said to be £300 million worth. We also import fish to the value of £30 million.
Of course, many young men and boys brought home a goodly selection of fish merely through casting from the shore. In Blind Sound, for example, on Inishmore in the Aran Islands, a youth would catch and bring home mackerel, pollock (pollack if you like), coalfish, sea bream and squid. Also what was roughly called rock-fish. But to go back on history. In the late 1950s and 1960s the herring fisheries based in Dunmore East and Killybegs were major concerns, but the export trade in this fish has gone down somewhat. A British writer has produced a European history book based on the herring and its movement and its trading through the Hanseatic League. The Vikings, it is believed, began their explorations when the herring shoals left the Baltic and, in the case of Ireland, settled at Dublin Bay and Dunmore East where there were traditional herring fisheries. In Holland, it is said, the foundations of Amsterdam were laid on herring bones. And, says Arthur, many of the great Dutch art works were commissioned by herring exporters.