At the Edge of Ireland (40 page)

We asked her about all the dire warnings of shoal elimination. “Lot of nonsense!” she replied emphatically. “There's still plenty of fish out there, ‘specially mackerel. That's a real moneymaker. But the quotas keep us back. March to September is our dead time. And I've got a crew of eight, and some of them have been with us more than thirty years and then their sons are coming in too, and that's something you just can't cast aside lightly.”

We nodded and I thought I'd test the waters of “truth in information” with Margaret.

“Well, it must still be worth it. There seems to be good money in it most of the time. One owner told us his boat goes out on three-to five-day-long trips, and he has a capacity of 450 tons, and depending on market conditions, he claims he can bring in around 1,500 euros a ton. So we did the math, and that seemed to top out 'round about 650,000 euros if he's got a full load. Which doesn't sound too bad to us!”

“Well, lucky him!” said Margaret with a twinkle that only half disguised the steely determination and strength of this remarkable woman. “But don't forget, full catches like that are very rare, plus the fact that the mackerel quota for the whole season for our boat is only 900 tons. On longer fifteen-day trips up toward Iceland you can go for tuna and whatnot if you can get a license. But you've always got the government inspectors snooping around. Most don't know the front end of a boat from the back end. But they're always trying to fine us—and drive us all out of business. Meanwhile, the Spanish boats seem to do whatever they want. They just use Castletownbere as a place to unload onto trucks bound for Spain.”

It was obvious that discussing the details of catch prices and the like was not considered polite in these parts. And Margaret was too busy anyway listing all their challenges, such as needing 60,000 gallons of gasoline to fill their 600-ton
Sea Spray
and decrying the farm salmon industry for “their endless problems with pesticides, sea lice, red dye number 2, chemicals in the blood, spreading diseases and poisoned water which kills wild sea trout and other fish.” She finally returned to the inequities of the quota system—“Oh, Lord,” she grumbled. “I'm so all-at-sea with the quotas!”

“So are we!” was about the only reply we could give.

 

E
VEN
G
RANT
F
ULTON, THE
inspector who supervises the quotas and enforcements for the government at the harbor, seemed to have problems clarifying the system for our neophyte understanding. Plus the fact you could tell he was uneasy being seen in public discussing such matters with blow-ins like us. He was a tall, lean young man with humor-filled eyes. And, by absolute coincidence (yes, I know—there are no coincidences), he was also the son of one of our favorite artists on the island of Harris, Willie Fulton, whose work we celebrated in our
Seasons on Harris
book. They both had that refreshing Pythonesque take on life and all its odd nuances, although in Grant's case, we sensed his frustration with his job and for the local fishermen.

“Oh, of course, there's always some that try to sneak around the rules, but we're really having a rough time compared to the Spanish and the French—we're being left the scraps, really. And you never know when a crunch point is reached with any particular species of fish. Like the shrimp on the Grand Banks off Newfoundland. They just vanished. One year you came back with brimming boats, next year—nothing.”

Grant told us quite a lot more when he and his wife, Gillian, invited us over for dinner at his beautiful home near Adrigole, which he'd built mainly by himself. But it was all essentially “off the record.” So we respect his position and responsibilities and leave it at that. Maybe we understood a little more than we did previously about the fishing industry, but I'm not really convinced. And it still seems to us that the Irish fishermen have been well and truly screwed by the EU—and even by their own government!

But we were utterly convinced by Gillian's superb soufflélike Yorkshire pudding that accompanied Grant's magnificent, perfectly cooked medium-rare standing rib roast. It simply was by far the best pudding we'd had in months—anywhere.

Gillian, with her research-based Ph.D., described her work with our old friend Jim O'Sullivan to ensure the continuity of his Beara Breifne Greenway, a trail of over six hundred miles commemorating that epic march of Donal Cam O'Sullivan, chief of the O'Sullivan clan, north to Leitrim following his defeat at his Castletownbere home of Dunboy Castle in 1602. More than a thousand followers set out on the march, but after skirmishes and decimating starvation along the way, only thirty-five finally arrived. An amazingly heart-rending—but ultimately inspiring—story.

Mending Nets by Hand

And we also found Susan inspiring too. Susan Steele, a doctor of marine biology, is the beautiful, blond-haired, energetic, lean, eloquent, and dynamic daughter of Norman and Veronica, the cheese makers at Eyeries. Her multitasking list of responsibilities for the Irish Sea Fisheries Board and other organizations was utterly mind-boggling.

The first time we met her down at the harbor, she'd just been given an additional responsibility as agriculture and business training coordinator and was having “a bit of an off day.” Apparently her husband, Andy, had just had a couple of ribs crushed by an ungrateful cow on their small farm off the Allihies Road as he tried to release it from a tangle of fence wire. “If it'd been a bull, he'd be dead!” she said with a beguiling “make the best of it” grin. And apparently she had also just realized that she'd left her purse, wallet, and “Lord knows what else” at a doctor's office in Cork where she'd had to take one of her children the previous day in an emergency for a “terrible ear infection.”

Then she remembered that her notes for a lecture she was about to give that afternoon on seaweed farming were also in her purse. Then she'd been told the motor was kaput on an inflatable boat she used to give classes in seamanship and safety at sea. (These were in addition to other classes she gave on kayaking.) Then someone had just told her that a party of twenty Japanese marine biologists had decided to visit her and her offices the following morning and would expect a guided tour, et cetera. And then she'd just been asked if she'd teach a “short fun course on the sea” for elementary school kids—starting next week. And then…

Enough! Point made. This young woman was a miracle of perpetual motion. A true new female Celtic Tiger restless and roaring to garner even more challenges. And laughing too—always laughing—as, with one of her gorgeous and equally energetic children, she led us around her “sample rooms” filled with scores of different seaweed species, a remarkable array of dead and living sea creatures, and her lecture room teeming with wall charts, more specimens, and copies of her books. (Yes, of course, Susan is an author too.) We were exhausted after an hour with her, but she looked as fresh and frisky as when we'd first met her.

She invited us up to her farmhouse for “a bit of tea” in the evening, so that's where we were around 6
P.M.
, drinking strong Irish-blend tea and selecting from a deluge of her home-baked goodies. Little kidlets flitted about like golden-haired angels. (“Soon as you've gone,” Sue said, “they'll turn back into devils!”) Andy, despite his bandaged ribs, insisted on showing us his extensively hand-built home and various pastures and paddocks on the sloping hillside overlooking Castletownbere.

In terms of learning more about the fishing industry itself, Sue seemed to agree with much of Margaret's synopsis. But she did offer one beguiling comment before we left: “Bearans are a bit like bulls. Normally pretty docile—but get us riled up and the bad guys had better start running for the hills—fast!”

 

A
ND RILING TIME MAY
indeed be approaching. Like a friendly young fisherman from Cornwall told me at MacCarthy's one evening, some are ready to let fly: “I can't tell y' the real truth about our fishin'. It's all far too political. It ain't worth m'life t'tell y' those stories. They're unbelievable. But troubles are comin'. So I keep t'm'self. I've only got a small boat. Thirty miles out is my maximum—hooking pollock around the reefs and wrecks out there. Many of the boats were sunk by German submarines in World War II, just like the
Lusitania
was nearby. And I'm doing this all quiet like. Not treadin' on anybody's toes. That's not so good for your health in these parts. But we are losin' the big fishin' 'round here. We've been really messed up by the EU and our own government. But in the meantime if I keep m'head down I can still make a nice quiet living…”

 

“A
NICE QUIET LIVING
” is definitely not what Richard Murphy is making out at his enormous 20,000-square-foot fish and seafood processing and packing plant on Dinish Island near the Castletownbere golf course. Founded in 1987 by Richard and his partner, Shellfish De La Mer—winner of an Irish Seafood Exporter of the Year award and creator of over 130 different products primarily from local boat catches—appears to be one of Beara's true economic success stories.

“I've always been optimistic about Beara,” Richard told me as we sipped coffee in his award-draped, file-strewn office. He was a handsome, strapping prototype of an ambitious, driven CEO, and I could tell he had a low quota of patience. That was particularly obvious when an urgent call came in from Spain while we were talking from some unfortunate salesperson who'd obviously botched a huge shellfish deal. And, well, all I can say is that I was glad to be me and not the fellow a thousand miles to the south whose day, or maybe rest of the year, would be utterly wrecked by what transpired in that crushing conversation.

We toured the vast plant, watching whitecoat-clad and hairnetted employees do amazing things with crabs and prawns and a host of other aquatic creatures (making chowders, seafood pies, hors d'oeuvre platters, cute little crab claw bites, et al). Richard emphasized that “what we need 'round here is a bit more initiative and risk taking. Another ‘value-added' processing factory for local catches of mackerel and whatnot, for example. Then we wouldn't have to worry so much about the deadening effect of quotas. I'm sick of seeing the waste of boats and human expertise here. I started off myself as a crab and lobster fisherman who couldn't sell brown crabs except to local restaurants. So I decided we should make the meat—beautiful meat—more appealing and saleable. And now—well—we're supplying over a thousand restaurants with customized products. The key is not to wait for government handouts and all that nonsense. Just get in there with some reliable friends—and make something happen!”

You don't hear that kind of rhetoric on Beara too often. Richard is obviously one of the true Celtic Tiger types, and so far his vision is helping keep Castletownbere alive and thriving.

Which brings us right back to the fisherman at O'Donoghue's who complained: “It's getting worse and worse.”

To which, I imagine, Richard would roar a Tiger-inspired reply of: “Not from where I'm standing!”

B
UT THEN THERE WERE
the all-too-human horror stories of the fragility of fishermen's lives among the pernicious coastal shoals and during sudden dramatic swings in local microclimates. One of the saddest events of our stay on Beara was in the late summer when two fishermen out in a small underpowered dinghy were capsized by a fierce squall under the black cliffs below Dzogchen Beara. One lost his life jacket and was drowned; the other managed to reach the jagged rocks at the base of the cliffs and scramble to safety.

The funeral was held in the massive church on the hill above main street and was packed to overflowing; fishermen and families from miles around stood outside in the dour, drizzling morning. “At times like this,” one of the drowned man's friends told us, “we're all one family.”

When the coffin emerged, it was taken for a ritual circular procession around the harbor past all the fishing boats, some partially cloaked with black cloth awnings. The streets and squares were so filled with mourners that the traffic was completely blocked for well over half an hour, but not a single horn was heard. Funerals here are major community events, and everything else ceases. Even lights were turned off in the stores and banks and all the offices along the main street. This was one of the saddest—yet most impressive—demonstrations of the solidarity and mutual support of Bearans we ever saw. In hindsight, the words of Oscar Wilde ring true for the people who live here and whose lives are tied to the ocean and the oh-so-fickle climate of southwest Ireland: “When people talk to me here about the weather, I always feel they mean something else.”

Yes, indeed. The idiosyncrasies of the local climate may be intriguing—even amusing—to us blow-ins, but talk with the local fishermen whose fortunes and existences are linked inextricably to the moods and mayhem of the weather and you'll get a far different interpretation.