Licensed

A licence is a quiet object. It is a few pages, a reference number, a signature, a date. It does not smell of the sea or make any sound. And yet the one issued this year for Shot Head, in Bantry Bay, will put eighteen cages of farmed salmon, a permitted harvest of some two thousand eight hundred tonnes of fish, into a working Atlantic bay, and every wild salmon and sea trout with business in that bay will live, from now on, in the shadow of that piece of paper. The distance between the weight of the decision and the lightness of the document is the whole of the thing I want to write about.

Because here is what happened next, and it is the sort of detail that ought to stop a person. When the licence was granted, Inland Fisheries Ireland, the state body whose entire remit is the protection of the wild fish, announced that it would take the state to court over it. Judicial review. The government’s own guardian of the salmon, going to the High Court against the government’s own department for the way it had licensed a salmon farm. If you designed a system in which the left hand had to sue the right hand to do its job, you would be laughed out of the room. We have built exactly that system, and we are living inside it, and we have stopped finding it strange.

Some of the strangeness got an airing this year. A team of reporters went through the licensing of Irish salmon farms in forensic detail (the series was called Troubled Waters, and it is worth your evening), and what it laid bare was not a conspiracy but something duller and more corrosive: a regime so slow, so overlapping, so encrusted with appeals and renewals and expired permissions still operating as though live, that no one inside it seemed fully in command of it. Licences running years past their nominal end. Sites operating in a kind of legal fog. A structure that a person could be forgiven for thinking had been arranged, whether by design or by drift, so that no single hand ever has to be seen to sign the consequential line.

I have tried, in fairness, to hold the other side of this in my head, because the people are not the paper. There are families on the coast of west Cork and Connemara and Donegal whose living comes off these farms, in parishes the state forgot a long time before it remembered aquaculture. When a man in Bantry defends the farm, he is not defending a Norwegian balance sheet. He is defending a wage in a place with few of them, and I will not stand in a lodge in Galway and sneer at that. The tragedy, and it is a real one, not a rhetorical one, is that the wild fish and the wage have been set against each other, when the sea is wide enough, and the technology now good enough, that they need not have been.

But a bay is not wide enough for everything, and this year Bantry gave its own evidence, without being asked. In one of its farms, something like a hundred thousand fish died, not caught, not harvested, simply dead, in an algal bloom, the kind of event that visits a place when you hold that many animals in a warm crowded net in open water and call the arrangement farming. A hundred thousand dead fish is not an argument anyone made. It is just what the bay did, once, this year, and it will do again, because the conditions that produce it are not a mistake in the system. They are the system.

What troubles me most is not the farm. It is the paper, and the way the paper launders the decision. When a wild river fails, you can walk its banks and see it: the empty pool, the weed where the redds should be, the heron standing hopeful over nothing. When a licence is granted, there is nothing to see. There is a website, a notice period most people never hear about, an appeals board, a signature. The harm is real and the moment of its authoring is invisible, and a harm you cannot photograph is a harm a society finds very easy to allow. The cages arrive; the smolts thin; the sea trout come back early and lice-ridden, if they come back at all; and no one can point to the afternoon it was decided, because it was never decided in one afternoon. It was licensed.

I do not know how the court will find. By the time you read this it may be settled, or it may be years off, because that too is how these things go. The wild fish keeps its own fast calendar of seasons and runs while the human calendar of hearings and adjournments grinds along at its own unbothered pace, and the two never quite meet. What I know is that a fisheries service should not have to sue its own government to be allowed to protect a fish, and that a country which loves its salmon the way this one says it does should be embarrassed that it has come to that.

The bay at Shot Head is beautiful, the way the whole of that coast is beautiful, mountains coming down to a sea that has fed people here since before there was a state to license anything. Stand at the head of it on a still evening and you would not know that anything had changed, or was about to. That is the trouble with a licence. It changes everything and looks like nothing. A few pages, a reference number, a signature, a date.