Three in a Hundred

By the end of last season the ghillie could count the fish on the fingers of one hand, and he is not a young man, and it is not a short season. He did not say it the way a scientist would say it. He said it the way you tell someone a relative has stopped eating, quietly, and looking at the water rather than at you, because the two of you already know where the sentence is going.

Then, this spring, the report came out and said the same thing in the language of the state, and everyone acted surprised.

The numbers are not complicated, which is the terrible part. In 1975, something on the order of 1.76 million wild salmon returned to Irish rivers. The figure now runs at a small fraction of that. Inland Fisheries Ireland described this year’s picture, without ornament, as a catastrophic decline. Of the young fish that leave the rivers of the west and go out to the Atlantic, three or four in a hundred come back. Not three or four in ten. Three or four in a hundred. You could stand on a bridge over a good river for a whole day in the run and understand the statistic in your body before you ever saw it on a page.

I want to be fair about the causes, because the salmon deserves better than a slogan. The sea has changed. The water out where the salmon feeds, off Greenland and the Faroes, is warming and rearranging itself, the plankton blooming at the wrong time, the small fish the salmon eats thinning out or moving on, and a fish that has crossed two thousand miles arrives at the feast to find it cleared away. This is happening on rivers that have never had a cage within a hundred miles of their mouths, in countries with no salmon-farming industry at all. Anyone who tells you the whole collapse can be laid at one door is selling you something. The ocean is the largest part of the story, and it is the part no minister can sign away.

But here is what sits badly, and it sits badly precisely because it is reasonable. This year the state committed to spend one hundred and ten million euro over four years taking down the barriers in our rivers, the old weirs and culverts and dams that stop a fish reaching the gravel it was born to spawn on. That is good work. It is overdue and it is real and I am glad of it. Take out a weir and a salmon can get upriver; there is no argument to be had. It is money spent on the part of the problem we find easy to look at.

And all the while the sea loughs of the west (the narrow, brackish doorways every one of those upstream fish must pass through twice) stay open to the cages. We will spend a hundred and ten million euro to open a river to a fish, and we will not close the one gate we control on its way to the sea. There is something almost Irish in that, in the deepest and least flattering sense: an enormous, sincere, expensive effort applied to the difficulty we can bear to see, and a long practised silence around the one we would rather not.

I keep coming back to the money because money is where a society writes down what it actually believes, underneath what it says. Angling (rod and line, ghillies, the small hotels, the tackle shops, the whole quiet economy of people standing in rivers) is worth something like eight hundred and thirty-six million euro to this country every year, and it holds up the guts of eleven thousand jobs, most of them in places that have precious little else. It is worth several times what the farmed fish brings in. And yet it is the angling economy, the wild-fish economy, that is treated as the hobby, the nice-to-have, the thing that can be asked to wait while the licences are renewed. The value is measured and published and then, somehow, not believed.

You can feel the disbelief on the ground. A young person deciding whether to build a life on this coast, as a guide, a boatman, a keeper of one of these houses, is not deciding whether they love the work. They love the work; that was never in question. They are deciding whether there will be fish in fifteen years, because there is no such trade as a salmon ghillie on a river with no salmon. That is not a romantic question. It is a mortgage question, a school-run question, a will-the-child-have-to-emigrate question. The decline is not an abstraction that lives in a graph. It lives in whether a particular young man in Leenane stays or goes.

The report will be filed. There will be a season of articles, this one among them, and then the news will move on to something with a clearer villain, and the rivers will run down to the sea as they always have, carrying fewer and fewer of the fish that made them worth naming. I do not think anyone in particular decided this. That is the hardest thing to hold. No one woke up and chose the end of the wild salmon in the west of Ireland. It is being arrived at, the way you arrive at the bottom of a hill, by a great many small releases of the brake.

The ghillie will be out again this season. He will tie on a fly in the grey light and work a pool he has worked for forty years, because that is what he does and because hope, in a fisherman, is not optional equipment. Some morning a fish may come to him, bright and impossible, straight in from the salt, and for the length of that fight the arithmetic will not exist. Then he will slip it back, and watch it go, and count.