A striking headline - " Giant Irish Salmon Returns to Rhine Estuary" - stands over a picture on page one of Marine Times, a tabloidsize trade publication, showing a member of the German Inland Fisheries Service cradling the 21lb fish in his arms and, as the caption also remarks, "with pride".
It was caught on the River Brol, a subsidiary of the Rhine, and scientific analysis has confirmed that the fish had its origin in Burrishoole, Co Mayo. The publication informs us that since 1992 Irish scientists of the Marine Institute, salmon management services division, have co-ordinated the export of millions of Irish salmon ova to the German programme Lachs 2000 (lachs is German for salmon). They have also given biological and other aid and advice to their counterparts. As well as Burrishoole salmon, there are Shannon and Cong stock going Rhinewards.
Many people will be amazed to read that this big salmon was only four years old when it came back to the river Brol. Its "fantistic growth" not only indicates the excellence of the Burrishoole stock but, as Dr Ken Whelan has said, this fish may have spent two years at sea in very fertile feeding grounds - or so this pair of ears understood him to say. He points out in the same publication that, at the turn of the century, we received salmon ova from Rhine hatcheries so "it is only appropriate that, as we enter a new millennium, Irish salmon ova are laying the foundations for a salmon revival on mainland Europe."
We have indeed benefited from ova from Germany, going back for even more than a century. Mitchell Henry, the Manchester millionaire who bought the Kylemore Estate in 1862, set up in fish farming as early as 1863. One year eggs of Rhine salmon were introduced but Henry thought that while it gave heavier fish, these were "not very nice-looking". At the hatchery near Killorglin, around the same time, 10,000 eggs of Rhine salmon and 10,000 from the German river Weser were laid down. Noel P. Wilkins, in his book Ponds, Passes and Parcs, Aquaculture in Victorian Ireland, gives many other examples.
Fish farming is an ancient practice, dating back to the Greeks and Romans. And think of all the fish that were needed for religious houses for days of fasting all down the ages.