There have been scares about industrially reared chickens. Recently, in acute form, the scare about beef. Questioning all round, maybe, about the way animals are reared and marketed. No scares, from memory, about bad eating qualities of fish, unless those swimming near nuclear plants. But our river and lake running trout and salmon are, beyond cavil, the best of eating.
A great deal of thought and science go into the overseeing of the same trout and salmon. In the annual report of the Salmon Research Agency of Ireland for the year ended December 31st, 1955, one of the most interesting points arises from catchment management. Dr Ken Whelan, Director of the Agency, expanded on this in a talk he gave last autumn. Summed up, his message was, basically: "manage the catchment and leave the fish alone". Some exaggeration, of course, but massive injections of non native salmonids, for example, along the Pacific coast, had shown that money had often been poured in to no avail. Fishery biologists, he said, had come to realise that it is not the fish which drive the catchments, but the catchment that drives the fish.
Catchment covers a wide swathe. And essential to this approach is tolerance of other users of the resource, and the striving for co operation and compromise. Thus, some controls or guidance on the extent of conifer plantations; controls on the methods of exploitation of peatlands; controls or arterial drainage; the maintenance and preservation of bankside cover and prohibition of gravel removal.
The Agency came up against a stone wall when they tried to tackle the serious results of sheep overgrazing, arising from the headage scheme, which led to erosion and the draining of peat into the Burrishoole waters. A consultant from the USA spoke to Department of Agriculture and EU officials, but "they were steadfast in their defence of the headage payment system on the basis of its social welfare benefits".
A need here for flexibility, ingenuity and diplomacy. Salmon is as much a part of us as any other creature. May that problem be worked out, acceptance to all interests. Problems of minor pollution, says Dr Whelan, and predation, can be reversed, but habitat loss is permanent, irretrievable. Seems obvious, of course, but it will be no mean task to keep our rivers clear, clean, with suitable vegetation and water life. Clear and running. For sport, for food and just because that's the way they should be in this green island we so much boost abroad.