Sir, – As a life-long fish keeper and former dealer in tropical fish and reptiles, I must take issue with John Fleming (An Irishman's Diary, August 5th).
He refers to Jebi’s tropical fish shop on South Richmond Street, an establishment very familiar to me – it was where as a teenager, more than 50 years ago, I bought my first tropical fish.
The star attraction, your writer tells us, was a “defanged piranha”. I should really like to know how one defangs a creature which has no fangs to begin with. I remember the fish very well; it was affectionately known as George and was not in fact a piranha, but a closely related fruit- and nut-eating species called a pacu. The specimen referred to was much larger than any known piranha. – Yours, etc,
IAN KAVANAGH,
Kilmainham,
Dublin 8.