Sir, - One wonders how much longer the Minister for the Marine and the Marine Institute can continue to deny the proven link between sea lice from salmon farms and collapses of wild sea trout and salmon populations. After all the Norwegian government, which oversees the biggest fish farming operation in the world (not to mention its offshoots in Ireland), accepts it. Likewise, the Scottish, and our own Environmental Protection Agency. Now we hear the Minister is to set up a new committee on sea trout which will no doubt tell him what he has heard a dozen times before. Could we be forgiven for thinking that this is just another delaying tactic to allow the Minister to continue to licence salmon farm expansion with impunity? An unbridled Irish salmon farming industry is projecting a more than five-fold expansion within the next few years. At this rate, the tribunal of inquiry into the mishandling of the sea trout collapse by Government agencies is scheduled for 2010, when wild sea trout and salmon in Ireland will have become extinct. - Yours, etc.,
Prof Graham G. Shaw, Chairman, Save Our Seatrout, Windgates, Bray, Co Wicklow.