The Junior Transport Minister says seals in Donegal are consuming four times the amount of fish being landed, which is causing major problems in the conservation of salmon stocks.
Pat 'The Cope' Gallagher made his comments whilst calling for a seal cull in response to a report published by the Independent Working Group on Salmon during the week.
We all know that seals eat salmon - in fairness, they eat all sorts of fish and if they can get a salmon - either out of a net or catch it themselves - that is what they do. A salmon in net is a 'cheap' and highly nutritious meal for a seal in terms of the energy required to get it. In the wild, salmon are an extremely fast fish which take a lot of energy and 'missed tries' for a seal to catch one and as such are a poor use of a seals energies and you can be sure seals know this well. Wrasse, pollock, coaley etc are a safer bet for a seal in terms of the catch ratio to the energy it has to spend to feed.
Similarly, large shoals of herring, mackerel and other oily fish make another easy target for seals - but then we have tank boats sucking them up left, right and centre.
Since Pat 'The Cope' has never thought further ahead than the next election, one can assume his grasp of history is just as shortsighted.
Perhaps he fails to realise that years of commercial fishing have hammered the other stocks of the seal's normal food fish. Perhaps he fails to realise that we have 'trained' seals to see netted salmon as a cheap meal. Seals are not stupid. They have had to adapt to survive.
I think we all know that if we culled every seal in Irish waters by the close of business today, that it would have little if any impact on the salmon stocks. What would be the next target? Dolphins? Toothed whales? If you think about it, anglers could be classed as a threat to salmon. Would the next proposal be to cull 28,000 anglers to keep the 850 salmon drift net licence holders voting for 'The Cope'? I doubt even that would help. What about farmers? Agricultural practices and run-off degrade river habitat for salmon. Does 'The Cope' plan to cull them as well?
If we culled all the other threats to salmon as above, who are we left with? Poachers? Once we get rid of them, we are left only with the netters. So, an exercise in futility, I think.
Meanwhile, back in reality, we all know that a seal cull will not happen. The Irish and international public would not permit it. 'The Cope' knows this so feels safe to advocate it, so he can be seen as the fisherman's friend. However, I am concerned that he is sending a message to the fishing community that shooting seals now has tacit government approval. Furthermore, if the entire government was made up of individuals like 'The Cope', then we might well be looking at a situation today where seal culling was allowed.
What will the next proposal be to conserve salmon if a netting ban is not put in place? Will Irish anglers no longer be allowed fish for salmon - the only licences being issued to tourists?
Government mismanagement of salmon has brought things to the sorry state we see today where once again, small communities on the fringe of Europe, which have been failed time and time again by successive governments, are being failed again. Deprived of any inward investment, ruined by the lack of alternative employment, these small communities are about to be deprived of yet another small source of income. When you add to that the fact that it is now near-impossible to get a licence to fish pots or anything else, for that matter, it is little wonder that these communities feel that they are under threat.
I have to disagree with the recommended compensation package. Unfortunately, it's tailored to give the small fisherman least and those who took the most salmon get the lion's share of the money available. I want to see a flat rate for all licence holders, regardless of catch rates. I think the least our sham of a government could do is to make that compensation package significant, instead of offering maybe as little as ?2-3000 to men who have fished all their lives in return for withdrawing from the salmon fishery. Make an offer of maybe ten times that and see how many fishermen would accept it - offering a realistic choice would be a much more sensitive way to deal with the matter than to impose a dictate.
Before anyone gets up in arms about the cost of such a package, just remember we can spend over 100m on software that won't work and multiples of that figure on tribunals that achieve little or nothing.
Like the Independent Salmon Commission, I see little option now but to ban drift netting. I truly wish it were otherwise, but in reality, it isn't. We have to deal with the current situation as best we can. Effective management measures just 15-20 years ago, maybe less, could have avoided the current situation. But short-sighted politicians have brought about what we have to deal with now. And their latest response is no better now than then.
