There is a great deal of lore and glamour and plain guff about the eating of the oyster. Mrs Beeton would bring you down to earth with her recipe for oyster sausages. There was veal in it too, and the oysters were tinned. But for those who can take it - and some are allergic for various reasons - it is one of the really good things of life. It is an important part of our fisheries, too.
Arthur Reynolds sends a neat four-page brochure, well illustrated: News From Clarenbridge, which he describes as The Pearl of Galway Bay. For a big effort is being made to nurture and protect its oyster beds and to expand the output - with some help from the States and from Europe. Quite a lot of money in it. Each year from 400 to 500 tonnes of native oysters are harvested from Irish waters. That's the one you eat in the months with an `R' in them. Then the Pacific oyster is now farmed too, the year around. It produces 4,500 tonnes annually. Yet Arthur says the native yields three or four times the value to the fisherman per oyster.
Of course, the oyster has been eaten here since Mesolithic times - the first hunters and fishers. Their dumps or middens are still found. People are inclined to get lyrical about this creature. Writes Arthur: "Believe it or not, in one swallow of a Clarenbridge oyster, you are treating your body to iodine, iron, copper, zinc, manganese, calcium, magnesium, phosphorous and sulphur. All that plus a delightful gastronomic experience." (Presumably all of those entities mentioned are good for you.) Oysters, he points out, were not always a luxury food in Ireland. (Does anyone remember when men or women with huge baskets of shellfish used to come around some Dublin pubs? Publicans probably felt that this would only increase the thirst of their customers, and often allowed the practice.)
He quotes one Robert Neild, who wrote a book The English, the French and the Oyster. Of the taste, he says it is a nectar distilled by the oyster from the cool waters of the ocean, and goes on that it is not just the taste, "it is the pleasure of putting into your mouth something that is cool, wet soft and sensuous." In all four pages the word "aphrodisiac" didn't hit the eye.
All this in aid of The Clarenbridge and St. George Oyster Advisory Committee, with many distinguished local and other names, including our man who is a director of BIM (Bord Iascaigh Mhara) and an intrepid mariner.