The fishermen of Lough Neagh make their living from eels - ugly, slimy andoddly exotic, writes Nuala Haughey

The lough will claim a victim every year.

It has a virtue that hardens wood to stone.

There is a town sunk beneath its water.

It is the scar left by the Isle of Man.

- Seamus Heaney,

A Lough Neagh Sequence

I grew up near the shores of Lough Neagh. The freshwater lake is home to one of the biggest commercial wild-eel fisheries in western Europe, but to me it was an unremarkable expanse of water where we swam in the summer, fearful that we would be sucked into huge holes caused by sand dredging. Other children had died that way, we were warned, as we waded out from the grassy foreshore, which was dotted with cowpats.

Oddly, we never ate eel in our house, although on Fridays we sometimes had pollan, another fish indigenous to the lough. As a teenager I studied Seamus Heaney's seven poems from A Lough Neagh Sequence, dedicated to the fishermen. I shuddered at the image of a youth standing in the midst of a "jellied road" of eels crossing land.

Like many people I developed prejudices against eels, a much stigmatised fish. Slimy, ugly, slippery snake-like creatures. But although I was repulsed I was also attracted by the exoticism of their life cycles: the long journeys from their spawning grounds in the Sargasso Sea, between the Azores and the Caribbean, to the shores of my native Lurgan, in Co Armagh, carried across the Atlantic Ocean by the Gulf Stream. About 14 years later, after they have turned from brown to silver, they leave the lough, when the moon is in its dark phase, to spawn and die in that same salt water.

Eel fishing on the lough is controlled by Lough Neagh Fishermen's Co- operative Society, based in the northerly village of Toome, which straddles the River Bann. At its helm is Father Oliver Kennedy, a straight-talking Catholic priest from the Falls Road in Belfast.

In the 1960s he played a key role in an agitation by the fishermen against the Dutch-English company that then had a stranglehold on eel-fishing rights on the lough. In 1963 the young curate helped the fishermen set up a trade union that negotiated more favourable fishing regulations with the company. The trade union evolved into a co-operative society that by 1971 had bought out all the company's shares.

Today the co-operative has a turnover of nearly €6 million and issues some 165 licences to boat owners. Fishermen who are shareholders also share in the profits at Christmas and Easter, based on the sales of the mature silver eels caught in weir traps each autumn as they attempt to leave the lough.

During the season for brown eels, from May to October, the fish are collected from the fishermen around the lough and delivered each morning to the co-op's premises next to the river.

On a recent mid-morning I looked on as newly arrived eels were tipped from metal containers onto long tables where they were sorted for size (16 inches is what the main markets demand). The smaller ones were cast into a channel that flows back into the river. The larger fish were also removed, for some select customers.

The eels were still alive when they were packed in plastic bags, where they slowly rotated around large chunks of melting ice. By lunchtime all five and a half tons were boxed and dispatched by road to Belfast City Airport.

Seventy per cent of the eels were destined for Holland, where they would be smoked overnight and on sale in holiday resorts the next day. The others were headed for London, where the peculiar cockney taste for jellied eels lives on and where smoked eel has become a delicacy.

The domestic market is non-existent, explains Father Kennedy, who is dressed in a black open-neck shirt and cardigan. Seated in a black leather high-back chair behind his huge cluttered desk, he has the air of a benign godfather. "There's no way you will ever develop a market in Ireland for the quantity of eels caught," he says. "Irish people just shudder at the very thought of eels. They don't like the appearance of them." Father Kennedy talks in a Belfast accent that has mellowed over four decades in Toome. He doesn't pause for breath as he explains how the market boomed in the 1970s but now Dutch and Danish farmed eels have contributed to an increase in supply and a corresponding decline in price.

The quality of Lough Neagh eels is unrivalled, he says: their fat content makes them ideal for smoking. They feed on the larvae of midges, swarms of which plague the lough and its shores in early summer.

Each spring the young, thread-thin eels, known as elvers, are trapped by the co-op as they enter the River Bann near Coleraine, on the northern coast. Then they are transported in tanks to the lough, saving them from being gobbled up by perch and pike on their journey downriver. Between six million and 18 million elvers used to make this run annually. But in 1983 only 726,000 arrived, a dramatic fall-off that is attributed, among other factors, to overfishing in continental Europe, shifts in the Gulf Stream and pollution.

The elver run has increased somewhat since then, but the co-op now has to recruit - buy - about half its young eels each year to maintain stock levels and ensure fishermen's livelihoods.

The co-op recently asked the Northern authorities for grants to help it restock, but with no luck. Father Kennedy rejects the authorities' claim that the law doesn't allow them to award any. "They keep saying they will bring in amending legislation, but they bloody never do it," he says, frustrated. Meanwhile, angling clubs and river-development projects are being funded. "I don't want to spell it out," he says. "But it's an application from an enterprise that is basically from a nationalist community and it doesn't receive favourable consideration."

Eel fishing on the lough has traditionally been a job for Catholic fishermen in the five counties that border its shores. Tricolours are hoisted high on lamp posts in the nationalist villages and townlands dotted along the lough's western shore in Co Tyrone. The talk among the fishermen today is of GAA and Tyrone's chances in the All-Ireland.

One of the co-op's protection officers, Bill McElroy, takes me out in his patrol boat, a high-speed launch. He plys the lough in shifts, checking in with the fishermen about how they are faring as well as ensuring they don't overfish and use the right techniques.

A former fisherman, he says he loves his work, although come mid-April, when the brown eel season is about to start, he still gets that old hankering to be out setting a line net. When the season is over the self-employed fishermen work as plasterers, joiners, brickies.

We set off in McElroy's patrol boat from a small marina at Aneeter, near Coagh, on the western shore. It's a bit choppy this afternoon, and the clouds hang low over the grey-blue water. In the distance you can see the Mourne mountains and the two steeples of the Catholic and Protestant churches in Lurgan.

McElroy says about 20 boats out today are using draft nets; another 80 are setting long lines with bait. These are the only two sanctioned fishing methods. Fishing is poor compared with last week, when the catches were exceptionally good, he says.

McElroy comes alongside Thomas and Gerry, brothers setting their lines, which they will lift before dawn the following morning. The men sit astride a bench at the stern of their sturdy turquoise-blue boat, painstakingly threading small worms onto 1,200 hooks that they then cast into the sea. Gerry is fishing almost 40 years, Thomas longer. This morning they took in seven stone, half of what they got the previous day. "It's a way of life," says Gerry. "It's not as good as it was, but it's not too bad at all." The talk turns to football. Tyrone and Armagh are bitter rivals, but the men are polite in the company of a Lurgan woman.

On another boat two younger brothers, Noel and Raymond, are using a draft net. They set the draft three to four times an hour, then haul in the net, steadily pulling it into the boat hand over hand. Today they are catching about 15 eels a pull. Not as good as yesterday. Noel has been fishing since he was 12. He works as a joiner out of season. It's better paid than catching eels, but he prefers the fishing. "The time I started fishing everybody around 16 or 17 wanted to fish. Now there's nobody," he says.

Raymond empties each catch into a water-filled metal drum in the middle of the boat. The eels slowly churn around; their scaleless skin is shaded in lovely hues of bronze, gold, brown and violet, with a pale cream underside.

Noel is a huge man, twice the size of his brother. I ask if can swim and if it's true the lough will claim a victim every year. He smirks and says he can't swim. He tells of this drowning and that and of the man whom a lifeboat is named after, only I can't make him out over the noise of the engine. Not quite one victim a year, but near enough, I gather.

I return home with two packets of Dutch-smoked Lough Neagh eels, a kind offering from Father Kennedy. I eat the oily fillets, gently warmed under the grill. They melt in the mouth and their taste is buttery, rich and deep.