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the improved kinds of Fixed Apparatus within the limits of a 

 " several fishery" should be sanctioned by Parliament. The Act 

 of 26 George III., though saving to proprietors a title to weirs 

 of which uninterrupted possession for thirty-one years had been 

 enjoyed, or to those who held them by patent or charter-grant, 

 whether corporate bodies or private persons, had expressly for- 

 bad that any thing contained therein should be construed to give 

 any right whatsoever to any person to erect or maintain any 

 weir, but such as the laws then in being gave. 



The new concession was intended for the benefit of the owners 

 or lessors of entire river piscaries; and not, by implication 

 to extend to the erection of stake-nets in real or doubtful 

 f several' fisheries on one bank of a public estuary. There were 

 few piscaries of the former description in Ireland which the 

 concession would have benefited ; and the bill went farther, not 

 only to abrogate the old law, but to create a new right of * seve- 

 ral' fishery, quasi the use of stationary nets, on the coasts and 

 in estuaries, by the occupiers of land, subject to the landowner's 

 consent. To permit their erection was a manifest encroachment 

 on the common law right of every person to fish in the tideway, 

 not merely as far as that part of the river occupied by them, but 

 as creating a novel and powerful means of capture, by individuals, 

 of much of the fish that would otherwise have passed up to the 

 employers of the common modes.* 



The principle of ' conducing to the public advantage' by 

 insuring a large supply of good fish, was the ostensible object 

 of the measure ; but this has not accrued the fisheries have 

 fallen off, and their decline must be attributed much to the 

 operations of the act, and the insufficiency of subsequent 

 arrangements to carry out its entire provisions. 



2nd. With respect to the ' equity or justice of the principle 

 proposed to be adopted/ 



The contention between upper and lower proprietors re- 

 quired, (it is stated,) the interposition of the law. Great 

 jealousies and differences had arisen : those along the estuaries 

 and coasts had gradually extended the use of the obnoxious 

 engines,f and they w^ere accused of so effectually closing the 



* The Committee of Inquiry had recommended that the acts relating to the 

 sea fisheries should be wholly repealed ; the framers of the new measure ex. 

 tended this advice to the repeal of those relating to inland or river fisheries. 



f Stake-nets were introduced into the lower Shannon by a native of Scotland, 

 named Halliday, and that mode of fishing continued for many years with very 

 great success. A trial came on, and they were pronounced illegal by the Court 

 of Common Pleas, under the statute of Charles I., Lord Norbury being the 

 presiding judge. In consequence of that decision, Mr. Halliday abandoned the 

 fishery ; but the peasantry of the country, having seen how the fish could be 

 taken, set up weirs of their own : the individual proprietors would not do so, 

 because they might have been liable to be proceeded against; but persons hold- 

 ing leases under them, generally poor people, put up the stake-nets along the 



