Sir, - Congratulations to The Irish Times for giving prominence (Out of the West, April 2nd) to wise moves in the West of Ireland to promote the production and value enhancing use of the coral-like seaweed called maerl. But credit is also due to those who campaigned for this to be done back in the 1960s and who for their pains received the well-known bureaucratic freeze-off.
These were the Maritime Institute of Ireland, which had connections in Brittany where maerl is extensively produced and, particularly, its public relations officer at the time, the well-known Dublin seaman Desmond Branigan, who is doing research abroad at the moment and so not here to recall his very considerable efforts to get the value to Ireland of this product understood. He acquired at his own expense a considerable maerl-rich area in Co Galway and sought in vain help to exploit it.
The Maritime Institute in 1949 suggested to the Commission on Population and Emigration that we should encourage fish-farming here, and was laughed at. In 1959 it produced a memorandum, drawn up by master mariners, experienced air pilots and lifeboat officials, urging the introduction of a helicopter sea-rescue service, and was informed by the appropriate Minister, categorically, that this country would never need such a service. We were too, a few years later, after the rebuff over maerl, when we pointed out that the country was in sore need of a coastguard. Other practical suggestions we have put up have suffered the same fate, and long after been reluctantly accepted.
The national bureaucracy is doubtless honest and hard-working but it is not endowed with infallibility, nor with the right to take credit for introducing what it refused to see until it eventually became too evident to ignore. - Yours, etc.,
John de Courcy Ireland
Honorary Research Officer, The Maritime Institute of Ireland, Dalkey, Co Dublin