Ulster (Northern Ireland and Ireland) -- Description and travel
of money in the country where poverty before was universal, where
famine even was not unknown. A failure of the potato crop to-day is a
grievous loss: thirty years ago it meant something like starvation.
What took me to Milford the other day was significant of the new
order. I was with a departmental committee appointed to consider how
the fisheries of Ireland would be affected by the substitution of
peasant proprietary for landlord ownership; and our main purpose was
to emphasize the value of the interests involved, the possibility
of increasing that value, and the necessity for combination unless
the whole were to be destroyed. And here was no question merely of
providing an attraction for the summer visitor: it meant conserving a
mainstay of livelihood for hundreds of labouring men.
When I was a boy a regular feature in that countryside was the fish
pedlar--some old man or old woman with a donkey and two creels,
hawking round fish that had been carted up from the coast by
Sheephaven. Along the prosperous settled shores of Lough Swilly, by
Ramelton and Letterkenny, these poor folk found a market at the end
of a day's journey. It was a poor market and a small one. But since
the railroad was instituted, the fish pedlar takes a back place. Fish
goes straight to the great towns, and it has been worth men's while to
organize for catching the summer run of salmon which skirt the coast
in June and July. From Malin Head to Arranmore, and from Arranmore
into Donegal Bay, scores of thousands of pounds must have been earned
in this way during the past seven or eight years by the coast-dwelling
folk, half-farmers, half-fishermen, working through the short nights
in their four-oared yawls. A lucky crew will earn ten pounds a man in
two months' fishing--in a country from which each year thousands go
across to Scotland or Lancashire for field labour and are content if
they bring home ten pounds for their season's toil. It is easy to see
how great an added source of prosperity this fishing means. Yet if
the fish are killed out in the breeding streams, it ends the fishing;
and when a river is divided into a hundred interests instead of one,
no individual has a sufficient inducement to preserve the stock of
salmon. A lesson in citizenship has to be learnt; public opinion
has to be created. Donegal is leading in the attempt to develop
co-operative preservation of game and fish, and whoever helps that
endeavour is doing a good turn, not only to the interests of sport,
but to the interests of Ireland.
[Illustration: TORY ISLAND FROM FALCARRAGH HILL, DONEGAL]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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