A lesson for the times - FFFXXI about the Silver Darlings of Donegal.

Bbq for the RNLI at the Islanders' Rest.

It quite takes one back, all this jolly living on the brink of unthinkable catastrophe. Fears and indeed objections that we sixties types have had to push to the backs of our minds, in order to survive, are bubbling up again. Anyway the lucky ones among us have on the whole had a pretty good time since. ‘But now’, as the Americans have it, with ever more nuclear weapons in the hands of divers crazies and global warming beginning to gallop, anyone with any degree of awareness and responsibility has to address the dreaded question, how can we help our grandchildren to find a liveable future?

Any sailor can tell you that the first essential for getting out of trouble is to learn how to balance keeping one’s head and staying calm, with a keen sense of reality. Anxieties which we refuse to face undermine both these essentials; so let us all acknowledge that we are in deep trouble, even when it is the poor people perhaps thousands of miles away who are taking the worst hits. Whichever way one looks at them, those political narratives that are at present so dominant, especially in the USA, Britain and Israel, which build on our fears, must be rejected.

What is becoming of ‘the greatest democracy on Earth’? The few parts of the Duckie’s election platform that made some kind of sense, like cooperating with Russia, pulling out of Afghanistan or seriously addressing the problems of the national infrastructure, have all been dropped, along with his senior civilian advisors. Real authority seems to have largely passed into the hands of a triumvirate of generals, Generals McMaster (National Security Advisor), Mattis (Secretary of Defence) and Kelly (White House Chief of Staff).

While the Tories faff around in Britain and end up tagging along with that lot, even while they spout rubbish about reclaiming British sovereignty, the alternative is none too convincing.  It’s no good beating the drum of Keynesian socialism along with Mr Corbyn without a few more answers to hard questions, like why did neoliberalism sweep the board in the first place? It’s no good just putting it down to the likes of Mrs Thatcher, for it happened in Ireland and all over the place. Economic, environmental and spiritual or ideological factors all feed into each other, and aspiring  to some kind of genuine socialism without facing up to the real issues promises as little success as the offer of an idyllic Caribbean holiday with a hurricane in the offing.

So what of Europe? Is there any chance of finding an alternative route here? I wrote a letter to the Irish Times back when Ireland joined the E.C. to the effect that the big question was whether Europe would manage to become a real community of nations, or would degenerate into some kind of Fourth Reich. I pointed to the fate of the sea fisheries as a possible indication.

I did not mean to say that it was merely a matter of the management regime. Fisheries pose the whole problem of how the modern world can develop without destroying itself, in a particularly dramatic and archetypal form. To exemplify my meaning, in the following despatch From the Fractal Frontier, I follow this theme through several years, sticking with the story of the pursuit of the silver darlings  of Donegal in the 1970s.

FFF XXI, The Silver Darlings.

It was thanks to Jerry Cross that we were able to extricate ourselves from Somerset in reasonable shape. He brought the work on September Cottage to conclusion and had it sold, so that eventually we paid off our debts and had some left over, which mostly went on buying a fishing boat. This time we decided to put making a living ahead of getting comfortable! John Maguire put me up to buying a half-decker so that we could go herring fishing, after that first summer fishing in his punt out of Port.

The factory at Meananeary retained some of the approach of a cooperative, even if it was being bought out by the Irish Sugar Company. It was now concentrating exclusively on fish, especially herring, for which there was a strong demand on account of the North Sea being closed, so that the stocks there could recover from years of over-fishing. The herring came inshore to spawn in the month of November, and dense shoals of them occurred around the peninsula of SW Donegal.

We bought a 33’ traditional clinker-built double-ended half-decker up in Buncrana on Lough Swilly. She was called An Cnoc Mor and was obviously a direct descendent of the Viking long-ships. Such boats even used to come on the decks of ships from Norway; rather different to the vessels that were to come to Donegal from there a little over a decade later! We started off with no electronics or fancy equipment at all, just a 48hp Lister diesel. The only other bit of machinery was, er, a manual bilge pump. She was steered with a tiller.

The fishing gear consisted of ten clean-mended nylon drift-nets, imported from Scotland by Gundry’s of Killybegs. They were to be anchored overnight in fleets of five, each suspended by 6 buoys or blondies that were scrounged from various byres around the Glen, having been washed ashore and gathered by those keen beach-combers. A coil (120 fathoms) of 1½” polypropylene rope was cut in two in order to anchor a fleet of nets at either end. The anchors were made with old donkey-cart shafts, also scrounged around the Glen, and then all one needed was a trip-line for each of these.

So the great day eventually came when, with the nets boarded, we set off one November afternoon looking for ‘signs’, especially the presence of the black-back gull. This is the true herring gull; the herring gulls that go by the name are mere scavengers, but the black-back really did follow the herring, maybe just roosting in groups on rocky promontories in the daytime, especially lying in rafts on the water at nightfall. When we could shoot the nets where they were lying in the Uig of Malin Beg, off the Silver Strand, round in Malin Mor or off the Finn Shores under the great banks of Slieve League, we were sure of a good catch. The further west we went, the bigger and fatter the herring were inclined to be, with the very best of them on round Malin Mor Head in the Glen Bay itself, but the weather had to be very good indeed to fish there. Some years it just did not happen.

By far the biggest problem was judging when the weather was good enough to chance the precious nets, and to be able to steam home safely in the morning with a heavy-laden boat. Having shot the nets, we would steam back to Teelin and tie up while we went home for a night’s sleep. One needed to arrive back at the nets at the crack of dawn, and high was the excitement as they came into sight. Were they safely anchored the way we had left them? Sea-birds would be wheeling above them if there were fish in them, and a heavy catch would be tugging on the blondies. When the cry went up ‘the blondies are going under’, we knew we were in serious business!

There were four lads generally to haul the nets, while I had to keep the boat up to them as tightly as possible, without however getting the nets or any of the straps (buoy-lines) on the prop. Using the waves to help haul the nets, the lads would pull them across the boat, shaking as many of the fish out of them as possible in the process. Gannets were screeching and wheeling and diving right beside me, so that I could see them going down into the water to retrieve fish that had fallen off the nets, but not for a moment could I leave off concentrating on the work. The thrill of a good catch was indescribable, and likewise of the first cheque, cashed and divided at Biddy’s pub, and celebrated with rum and black!

Once the nets were in the boat, we steamed back to Teelin, if deeply laden with the odd nervous glance astern at the waves rearing up behind us. Safely back at the pier, a sheet of plastic was let down into the boat from above, arranged so that the nets could be pulled up without snagging and loose fish would slide back into the boat as they were shaken once more. Up on the pier, they had to be pulled over a spar set up between two piles of the wooden fish boxes, so that fish that were still stuck in them could be picked out. If we had been a bit slow in the morning, the conger eels would have got to work, leaving us with the remains of fishes twisted up in vile knots. Dogfish too might have got to work, leaving plenty of holes in the nets.

So when the nets were sorted and boarded back into the boat, and the fish in the stacks of four boxes which made a cran, then, if the weather held, we were off again. There were no coastal radio stations in those days, so the only forecasts were those on RTE from Dublin or the Englishman on the BBC. They were not that accurate and so a lot came down to our own judgement. For weeks on end we might get no chance at all; everything depended on being on the ball when one came. It was fine frosty weather of course that was best, even if it meant very cold days for us on Teelin pier, with the north wind cutting through us as it whistled down the bay into our faces. But the prices kept strengthening for those few years in the seventies, and it only took a few good catches to make our season.

For the second season we were more organised, with an echo-sounder and a little radio. We were doing fine, and soon there were about fifty men putting out in half-deckers and yawls around south-west Donegal for a share of the silver darlings. Meanwhile there was serious money being made in Killybegs, where some lads were getting very handy with mid-water trawls, towed between two boats. The first two generations of trawlers were mainly built by B.I.M., the state-owned Irish Sea-fisheries Board, many of them in Killybegs itself. Many good, satisfying jobs resulted all around the coast. The Irish fishing industry had been deliberately repressed in times past, as trawlers came from Fleetwood to harvest the riches of Donegal Bay. There was real pride in the country as it found its feet at last.

Killybegs was a boom town, though things went along sensibly enough for a while. The whitefish boats could make a living fishing just four days a week, using Friday and maybe Saturday morning to maintain their boats and gear, Sunday morning to go to Mass, the afternoon perhaps a football game, then off again early Monday morning. It was rather what the Spaniards call living en paz y en la gracia de Diós! But some people were getting to make serious money, and the way these things go, the fact that fish stocks were coming under serious pressure meant that one had to make more and more effort to keep ahead of this decline. Technology was developing at breakneck speed, its suppliers and the banks were anxious to be in on the action.

By the time eighty-foot trawlers were being built in Killybegs under the management of Don Patterson, the rationale for the state to be directly involved in financing and building boats was much diminished. In fact the powers that be in Dublin had already decided to privatise the yard, but it was a pity that they didn’t tell Don as much, as he slaved away trying to make it work. He was the son of a Moderator of the Presbyterian Church in the North, who had married a Catholic and come, like others whom we knew, as refugees from the pressures there, especially on mixed marriages. But Don felt let down, and eventually returned to Derry disillusioned with the way things were done in the Republic.

Some of the trawlermen were not above deliberately towing through the anchored nets of the half-deckers. More often they would try to scoop close by, which indeed would help us by chasing fish into our nets. These were big, full, spawning fish. How long could the shoals withstand such treatment? When things are going well, intoxicated with Progress and money, it is hard to stand back and give even to oneself the obvious answer to this question!

Decline of course was masked for some years by increasing prices, together with the massive increase in effort and development of technology. Soon bigger and bigger steel trawlers were being financed by the banks and built in Norway or wherever. Whereas we were landing by the cran in wicker baskets that filled a box, the new trawlers were pumping fish ashore by the ton.

I think it was in 1980 that the crash came. For some years we had been getting prices such as £15/16 per box. At the height of the boom, it was £27/28; a lot of money in those days. Now that inflation was taking off, the herring stocks were collapsing and also the market. The fish had got too expensive, the North Sea opened again, Canadians had got into the European market. All of a sudden, the herring, scarce as they were, were only worth £3/4 a box. It was all over for the small boat men of Donegal. If they packed up and went to Killybegs, they might get work on a trawler or a in a fish-factory there.

It has to be recognised that this debacle, while enmeshed in international trends, was a case of mismanagement here in Ireland which could not be attributed to the Common Fisheries Policy, as many like to do. The question is whether nowadays, in 2017, with so much evidence of the catastrophic potential of modern technology combined with unbridled capitalism in the ‘neo-liberal’ mode, we can cooperate with our neighbours in developing a new approach, which will combine the benefits of personal initiative with social responsibility, of development with care and respect for the natural world? We had better hurry up about it!

With thanks to Ger Kavanagh for the photos.