Riches all around us and not always recognised or exploited. A letter from Mrs Catherine Cavendish of Sandymount, Dublin. There is a plan to site a wind-farm on the Kish Bank and our correspondent is exercised to stress that the Kish "is virgin sea-floor and not just any old sea-floor". It is, she writes, one of the richest ecosystems in our coastal waters and as such is of major importance; it is a great spawning ground for fish, especially sole. It is a feeding place for puffins, terns and other birds, also for seals and their pups, for porpoises (the ones that left Dalkey Sound, she avers) and for dolphin.
The whole bank stretches from the north of Bray to just a bit south of Baily. It holds two communities, our correspondent writes, of Venus Clams. It is, in fact, a "pad" for crustaceans and molluscs and if you look in the upmarket fish shops in Brussels you will see the huge quantity of Teillins (a sort of mussel, Dr Christopher Moriarty tells us) on sale that could easily be harvested on demand in the vicinity of the Kish. She regrets the lack of interest from the media in the Kish but, of course, being mostly under water it does not have the visual appeal of Ballyseedy or the Glen of the Downs. It is ecologically more significant than the latter as it could never be replaced.
Dr Michael Woods, writes Mrs Cavendish, has asked interested parties to make submissions to him, but she is not hopeful. "The riddle of the sands - no one ever mentions the Kish. Why?" Well, that spirited appeal should stir up some ecologist. The Kish to many Dubliners is a lightship or something out there. Perhaps Mrs Cavendish will waken us up to its riches, its hidden ecological riches. She has obviously kept a keen eye on things marine for a long time, for she encloses a faded yellow cutting from this newspaper of April 1968, when the battleground was fought over by drift-net fishermen and riparian owners on salmon rivers and other interested parties.
Sir Richard Levinge, a leader among the latter, then managing director (from memory) of Guinness, was told by the netmen that they would refuse to drink Guinness and would take the campaign into every corner of Ireland. "Connemara fishermen will row up the Liffey in currachs to picket Guinness's brewery," was one threat. What happened? Y