Fish, long taken for granted, are now, in various parts of the world, disappearing or frantically being farmed, and sometimes in the process causing a great mess. Recently in Dublin and environs, immigrants have made us more conscious of the fish in our canals by catching them and, apparently, cooking and eating them. The popular concept of the pike-fisher, for example, is of men, or women, who sit patiently on the bankside, catch the fish, measure it, weigh it, maybe even photograph it and then return it to the water. The pike or bream or whatever as a plaything. A friend often talks of the time he spent in Berlin after the war as a correspondent. The city was divided into four sectors - Russian, French, British, US - and each country took a spell of duty as number one for a quarter- or half-year. At the end of the period, the retiring country gave a banquet or celebration. At a Russian banquet he remembers that the pride of the huge table was an enormous pike. So some people think of what we call coarse fish as well worth eating.
But outside the lake and river fish, there is much unease. Cod, for example. A French magazine recently carried a big headline: "Who Killed the Cod?" Over two pages it spread a huge picture in close-up of a heap of hundreds of cod of considerable size - presumably a catch of some years ago, for the article tells us that in about 10 years this formerly great fishing-ground off the grand banks off Newfoundland has gone to nothing. One picture shows a fishing village of bright, well0painted fishermen's houses and cottages on the peninsula of Avalon, and below that the disintegrated and abandoned dwellings of the same fishermen. In the late 1980s, one fisherman and his brother caught 50 tonnes of cod per season - sold to the United States for about $100,000. What happened? The fishermen blame the huge floating fish-factories and the dredgers for destroying the breeding-grounds. The big ship men blame the seals. A moratorium has not helped, it appears. A moral for more than the Canadians.
Are we reaching the point where it could be said: "The Atlantic salmon is dead? Long live the farmed salmon"?
A group of serious, concerned public figures recently suggested that the answer lies in buying out the drift-netters and the draught-netters, thus ensuring that the maximum possible number of wild salmon gets upstream to continue the eternal cycle. The Government has on its hands a matter of some material importance as well as a question of national prestige.
Y