Fintan, as his name naturally implies, was a person of transcendent wisdom and insight. In Irish mythology, he is the only human on the island of Ireland to survive the Biblical Flood that drowns everyone else. He does so by transforming into a salmon. In one poem he is imagined saying that “At the black outpouring of the Flood, /The Lord put me, to my misery/ Into the shape of a salmon at every spring”. In another he declares “I am Fintan the poet, a salmon not of one stream”.
He lives in this shape for 500 years and gets to know every river in Ireland. His story may contain some traces of a very ancient Irish past. The salmon-man is understood in the mythology as the keeper of traditions, the one who remembers all the accumulated wisdom that would otherwise be forgotten.
In the forms in which they were written down in the Middle Ages, these stories can be understood as an effort by medieval Irish people to imagine how humans came to live on this island – and how they might have survived an ecological catastrophe. Which is also the work our collective imagination ought to be doing now. What has happened to the Irish salmon is a warning about the wanton destruction of life on our island.
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It’s not surprising that the salmon was so important in the traditional understanding of the relationship between people and nature in Ireland. Both Boann, the goddess of the river Boyne, and Sinann, the goddess of the Shannon, are linked in their origin stories to magical salmon. Every Irish kid learned the story of the young Fionn Mac Cumhaill and the mystical salmon of knowledge. People visited holy wells in the belief that, if you saw a salmon leap in one, you would be healed and blessed.
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These fables surely sprang from a more literal sense of blessing. The abundance of salmon in Irish rivers must have been, for those who came here first, one of the island’s greatest joys. At least for part of the year, the waters teemed with majestic fish that were both a wonderful source of protein and intensely delicious.
It’s a remarkable thought that each of those Irish rivers has a genetically distinctive stock of salmon dating back to the end of the Ice Age. That’s over 10,000 years of fish swimming 3,000km to find the gravel beds under Irish streams where they were spawned, to lay their eggs and to continue the cycle.
Yet, in the last few decades, after all those millenniums, we’ve cut ourselves off from this wonder and turned our backs on its blessing. We’ve driven the salmon from our rivers, recklessly but ruthlessly.
It’s a profound thing to have done in a country that, when I was growing up, had a wild salmon proudly displayed on the front of its florin coins. Soon, perhaps, the idea of a wild Irish salmon will be as archaic as that now lost word, florin.
The weekend before last, at the lovely Waterford food festival in Dungarvan, I was talking to Sally Barnes. For 44 years, she’s been filleting and smoking wild salmon in her famous Woodcock smokery outside Castletownshend. The techniques she uses are in essence the same as those our ancestors used to extend the life of this extraordinary food source long after the salmon had resumed their epic journeys back up into the North Atlantic.
Barnes remembers when the wild salmon were so abundant that local people complained about being fed up eating them. And now she struggles to source them at all. They’re disappearing – and thousands of years of Irish tradition are going with them.
Last week, in an appearance before the Public Accounts Committee, Cathal Gallagher, deputy chief executive officer of Inland Fisheries Ireland, pointed out that the number of wild salmon returning to Ireland to spawn in 1975 was 1.7 million. In 2022, it was just over 170,000. He called this “a catastrophic decline in less than one generation”.
Given that the numbers are now just a tenth of what they were, he could hardly be accused of exaggeration. Stocks are so low that 80 of the 144 designated salmon rivers in Ireland have been completely closed for salmon fishing this year.
Why has this catastrophe happened? Climate change is certainly a factor and there is little we can do in the short term to alter its effects on temperatures in the Atlantic. But these effects make it all the more important that we control what we can – which is the state of our rivers.
One of the slow scandals of Ireland is the way we have allowed those waterways to deteriorate. In the late 1980s, we had 500 pristine rivers. By 2018, there were just 20 left. In 1990, 13 per cent of our rivers were assessed as being of the very best quality. In 2022, it was 1 per cent.
Much of this deterioration has been caused by the pollution of rivers with nitrates from waste water, cattle urine and fertiliser run-off. Forty per cent of Irish rivers now have excessive levels of nitrates. There is also pollution with phosphates from sewage, industrial discharges and fertilisers. Twenty-eight per cent of Irish rivers have excessive levels of phosphates. This is the result, not of active malignity but of short-sighted carelessness.
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Salmon are vastly more sensitive to this pollution than we are. They literally sniff it out. Their superpower is olfactory. If you dip your hand for a moment in a river, salmon many miles downstream will smell it and start to flee. They locate their river of origin largely by sensing its unique chemical odour and detecting the pheromones released into the water by other salmon.
And their astonishing sense of smell tells them that there’s something rotten in the physical state of Ireland. The salmon of knowledge has a grim insight into the flippancy with which we have rejected the bounties of nature and thousands of years of tradition.
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