Sir, - Mr Wall's letter of August 9th, while identifying a mass cull of seals as being of doubtful merit for the long recovery of inshore fish stocks omits to mention two relevant points.
Firstly, it is the prey species (capelin, sand-eels etc.) that the seals eat that have the greatest impact on fish stocks causing mortalities and low growth rates among white fish and salmon.
Seal populations in the North Atlantic have grown in recent times: Grey seals eat 2.4 tons of fish a year and have increased in number in the UK between 1954 and 1992 from 20,000 to 103,000.
We live and have done so for centuries in an increasingly managed environment. There is no such thing as a "natural" population, be it of seals or centipedes, unless you live in parts of Antarctica or possibly a few isolated pockets of Amazonia. The loss to fishermen using fixed tangle nets for white fish or drift nets for salmon is in the order of 25 per cent of their catch.
Seals are our competitors for food and require a coherent management strategy; I doubt that licensing individual fishermen to shoot at seals with assorted firearms meets that requirement. - Yours, etc.,
Mark Helmore, New Quay, Burrin, Co. Clare.