The way of life and livelihoods of island fishermen are under serious threat and they deserve our support, says Sally Barnes, the prominent artisan fish-smoker, writes LORNA SIGGINS
SALLY BARNES must have been a wild Atlantic salmon in one of her former lives . . . a finned athlete surmounting a weir on a river in full spate. Swimming against the flow seems to come very naturally to her, whether she is questioning a cosy consensus on the merits of the drift-net ban, or speaking her mind about farmed fish.
The Ayrshire-born founder of Woodcock Smokery in Castletownshend, Co Cork, famous for its top quality smoked salmon, knows her pectoral from her dorsal fin, her pelagic from her demersal, having taken the supreme accolade for her fish products at the Great Taste Awards in London in late 2006. A few weeks later, she faced a crisis when the Government caved in to EU pressure and issued the drift net ban that threatened to put her out of business.
Small wonder that there was a packed audience for a talk she gave recently at this year's Irish Skipper conference in Salthill, Galway. Many of the 4,000 dayboat catchers and fish farmers passing through from all compass points on this country's 7,500km coastline will have been aware of Barnes's highly critical voice when the Government proposed banning all drift-netting for salmon just over a year ago.
"As one skipper said to me, we're going to have to find something else to catch, Sally . . . We're used to diversifying, but who is going to look after you?"
It's that sort of empathy between catcher and artisan that has made Woodcock Smokery such a success. Attuned to the struggles of those trying to survive in an industry which is subject to a very politicised, overly bureaucratic and mismanaged EU policy, Barnes knows and understands her own community - and recognises that most skippers and crew are not the criminals that Government and EU officials would make them out to be.
Irish drift-net fishery has been a "victim" and not a cause of the decline in wild salmon stocks, Prof Noel Wilkins, former head of the National Salmon Commission has said, warning that the ban would "replace one set of problems with another". His successor, Joey Murrin, has recently tried to highlight several of these problems, including the lack of monitoring on rivers. Barnes agrees that the Government's failure to implement measures crucial to the survival of fragile stock has transferred a resource caught offshore to one caught inland by unscrupulous anglers.
"Unfortunately, there is now rampant poaching on river systems," Barnes says. "And what happened to the promise to restore river systems, to eradicate pollution, to protect spawning beds, and to have a proper system of control inland?
"I've been offered fish by anglers, of course, but I've said I won't take anything caught illegally. In any case, there is nothing quite like the quality of the salmon netted offshore. The fish has metamorphosed when it returns to its river, it has lost so much fat in that journey that it is not worth killing to eat . . . and the effluent in rivers is such that you couldn't stand over the meat."
BARNES'S FAMILY and neighbours were her initial quality controllers, when she first began smoking fish over 25 years ago. She has told the story often - how her husband Colin, now a whale-watching skipper, would bring home enough fish for several weeks when they did not have a freezer.
It was the three weeks' supply of mackerel that finished her off. She took out an old tea-chest, put a hole in the bottom of it, and began her first smoking experiments. "The fish kept falling into the sawdust however, so we managed to secure a kiln in exchange for some credit owed to us." The mechanical Afos kiln allowed her to smoke both "cold" and "hot", as in curing or cooking. She studied food production with Open University, and followed that with oceanography.
In 1996, a trip to Turin won her over to the Slow Food Movement, of which she is an ardent member. She nominated wild Irish salmon for the Slow Food "Ark of Taste", which was created in 1996 to catalogue foods that have been forgotten or marginalised and are at risk of disappearing. For that, she earned a reprimand from conservationists who were by then campaigning for a drift-net ban. "Slow Food came under pressure over that, to the extent that that nomination is currently suspended."
Barnes will not work with farmed salmon, nor will she try to hoodwink customers with loose but legal labelling - there is a lot of confusion among consumers about "organic" salmon, for instance, or calling fish "Irish" if it is smoked here but caught elsewhere.
One solution for islanders and indeed artisan producers such as herself, Barnes suggests, is to develop a market for other catches. Mackerel, herring, kippers, haddock and tuna also appear under the Woodcock label, but salmon comprised half of the 10 tonnes of fish preserved by her annually.
Over the past season, she has secured a limited supply of sea-caught fish from Scotland. "And what about developing more ranching?" she asks. Ranching has been tried on a limited scale here, but its success depends on having little or no coastal fishing interfering with the harvest of returning fish.
It involves breeding smolts in hatcheries, keeping them in nets in estuaries to allow the smell of the river to be imprinted on their memories, and then releasing them into the wild. It has proved to be very successful as a more natural form of salmon rearing and restocking in Iceland, Norway, Scotland and Alaska, and even in Spain and Portugal.
BARNES ALSO believes that the pressure on skippers to move into larger vessels for trip fishing has had a dramatic impact on the fresh fish market at home, although premium prices abroad are also an influencing factor. Because of high fuel prices, trip fishing boats stay out for three or four days at a time rather than returning with their catch. Sally Barnes would like to see more day fishing, and believes island communities have an opportunity to market a fresh daily catch.
Comhdháil Oileáin na hÉireann, the Irish Islands Federation, published an enlightened marine policy as part of an overall submission to Government on the future of offshore economies late last year. Projects such as holding tanks for storing lobster in recirculated seawater beyond the short summer season have been proving successful on Inis Oirr, for instance.
Barnes believes that smaller island fleets could develop their own niche market in daily-caught fresh fish.
"I did a diploma in social studies way back,"she says, "and I realise that island economies don't need the massive big factory planted there with some State agency's encouragement, benefiting no one in the long term when it shuts. Islands need small pieces of activity, based on developing skills which help to consolidate communities."
She has been talking to islanders on Cape Clear about setting up a smokery there, which would depend on day-caught fish and which would sell under her label.