Sir, - In your issue of December 11th you published an optimistic statement by a Norwegian expert on the future of fish-farming. This vividly recalled for me a story from 1948 about fish-farming and Norway, which, because it contains a lesson, surely merits re-telling.
In 1944 Norway was being mercilessly persecuted by Nazi invading forces, and the dramatic resistance being put up by Norwegian students echoed even into censor-ridden Iceland. Members of the Irish-Scandinavian society collected what money we could for them.
Norway then had no embassy here but a consul - a distinguished member of the shipping community in Dublin and a prominent member of the recently founded Maritime Institute of Ireland. The few pounds collected were handed to him.
Soon after the war I got a very grateful letter from the Norwegian Foreign Affairs Department, which stretched its generous gratitude to the point of sending me, weekly, for 10 years, voluminous official documentation on Norway's postwar reconstruction. A lot of this referred to the drive to establish profitable fish farming.
Mr de Valera's post war government, afraid of the return of wholesale emigration to Britain, established a Commission on Population and Emigration, to which organisations were invited to send suggestions for building employment here to keep potential emigrants at home.
The Maritime Institute appointed a committee to submit proposals, of which I was made secretary. Many plans for Irish maritime development were agreed, and when I brought Norwegian material about fish-farming, it was thoroughly discussed. We agreed to propose an investigation into the best way to introduce fish farming in Ireland.
When the Maritime Institute's delegation was called before the Commission, the representative of the fisheries section of the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries told the chairman that a group had just come in with some good ideas, but its project of trying to start fish farming in Ireland was simply not feasible. The chairman could be sure there never could be fish-farming in Ireland. Our delegation, which included such notables as Commander Morris, head of our naval force during the war, Col Tony Lawlor, an Seabhac, Leslie Green, the lighthouse expert, was let put forward our other proposals, though nothing in the end was done to implement them. Fish-farming was dead for some 10 years, by which time Norway was one of the most successful of fish-farming countries in Europe.
In a long life, I have seen this and many other delegations submit proposals to government Departments supposed to be forwarding the interests of education, sea-fishing and the nation's maritime economy; they listened to politely and subsequently ignored. So far as I am concerned, the officials, deputies or government members who met the various delegations ignored the fact that they were supposed to be the servants, not the masters, of the people in this supposed democracy. Over and over again they failed to encourage new ideas, but rather scorned them. Our bureaucracy is too full of people incapable of encouraging ideas.
John De Courcy, Ireland, Grosvenor Terrace, Dalkey, Co Dublin.