THE SEA FISHERIES OF IRELAND. 371 



then fishing offered their services to the State, but, " They were so strangely 

 affrighted one evening by a false alarm, as that in the night, on a sudden, 

 the entire Scotch liost put to sea, and quite disappeared from the Irish 

 coast until the following year." 



About 1625 the Lord Deputy appears to have visited Mayo, and con- 

 ceived the idea of developing the fishing industry there by applying for " a 

 patent for thirty years to some forty gentlemen willing to undergo the 

 charge of fishing, and to have a grant of the district from Achill to the 

 Stagges of Broadhaven. They doubt not they will build fair towns, and 

 employ large numbers of people to the benefit of the British Isles." The 

 projectors of this schem.e calculated that they would, in four years, have 

 20,000 people employed. " The Hollanders return home to repack, and, 

 perhaps, they may be retarded by foul weather, in which they cannot fish, 

 while they, the projectors, will not need to sail four leagues out of the 

 harbours before they apply themselves to fishing. This fishing borders on 

 the County of Mayo, the inhabitants the most barbarous and dangerous ni 

 all Ireland." 



History is silent as regards the civilizing and pacifying efforts of these 

 forty gentlemen, nor does it say how far they took the gains from the 

 Dutch, nor whether it led to any important development of industry m 

 Blacksod Bay. 



Schemes to suppress foreign fishing continued, and in 1667 an Act was 

 passed against importing fish taken by foreigners. In 1673 Sir W. Temple 

 proposed to Lord Essex that no one should be eligible for the House of 

 Commons or for the Commission of the Peace who had not taken a practical 

 part in the fisheries. Times, how^ever, again changed : England's policy 

 was influenced by the desire to develop the Newfoundland fisheries, and 

 bounties were actually paid on the importation of fish, caught and cured 

 there, into Ireland. 



With the opening of the century which has just closed, we come to a 

 period when prosperity, decline, and revival of the Irish fisheries follow one 

 another in rapid succession. The latter half of the eighteenth century was 

 the great period for bounties ; various Acts were passed establishing them, 

 or when frauds reached too high a level, regulating them. Vessels were 

 built to catch the bounties rather than the fish. Possibly the frauds in the 

 Scottish fisheries exceeded those in Ireland ; but a good illustration of how 

 the bounties worked out is given by Adam Smith, writing in 1759, where 

 he says, that the Buss fishery of Scotland in that year, resulted in only four 

 barrels of herrings, which in bounties alone, cost the Government £iS9 

 Js ()d. per barrel. This, no doubt, was an extreme case. In Ireland the 

 bounties, at first given for the capture of all deep sea fish, were subsequently 

 restricted to fish for curing. This drove the boats that used to fish for the 

 local markets on the east coast to the west of Ireland, where fish was more 

 abundant. The Skerries, Balbriggan, and Howth wherries went round the 

 coast of Donegal and as far as Mayo, while hookers from Kinsale and 

 other ports of Cork and Waterford, went round the south-west coast, and 

 were frequently found as far as the Coast of Mayo, where Achill Sound was 

 their favourite resort. 



These Cork boats carried long lines, hand lines, and herring nets, and 

 were in those days the only boats fishing with mackerel drift nets on the 

 west coast. The harvest fishing was the only mackerel fishing attempted. 

 When the fishermen complained of being forced by the bounty law to avoid 



