74 



their energies and practical knowledge for many years to the 

 subject. 



The Act constituting Boards of Conservators is then quoted, 

 as founded on the principle that local duties should be per- 

 formed by local parties, and that if found practically operative, it 

 will, in respect of the salmon fisheries, properly limit the duties 

 of the Board to those of a judicial or administrative class, in- 

 volved in the occasional consideration and passing of a by-law, 

 and the performance of professional or engineering duties, in 

 sanctioning works for the migration offish, and other judicial 

 or administrative acts which they are empowered to perform, 

 upon being duly moved thereto, and funds provided therefor. 



" Whilst the Inland fisheries of Ireland are naturally capable 

 of great extension in value, and will, in many districts, have 

 great benefit conferred on them by the progress of arterial 

 drainage, with its consequent facilities for migration, there is 

 so great a want of co-operation, such a clashing and violent 

 opposition of interest, private rights and class distinctions, and, 

 withal, so much want of sound information on the subject, that 

 we regret to see the struggle of parties, and personal or local 

 interest, too often, of late, absorb the attention and take the 

 place of the sound commercial principle on which the Act 5 

 and 6 Vic., cap. 106, was founded. 



" This Act, whilst it provided, as a matter of police, regula- 

 tions for the guidance of different modes of fishing, aimed 

 mainly at the increase of the quantity of fish, by stringent pro- 

 visions for close time, and protection in breeding ; and con- 

 templated, irrespective of parties or classes, the capture of the 

 largest quantities of fish in the best condition, during the open 

 season, consistently with the increase of the species. 



" The departure from this principle is the more to be re- 

 gretted in Ireland, where so large a proportion of the salmon 

 and trout fishery is, by law, public property, and where any 

 source of industry necessarily requires all the just liberty of 

 action it can obtain." 



The legalization and increased use of Stationary Apparatus 

 was granted by the Enactment on the grounds, that on the 

 sea coasts and in estuaries the changes of the tide become the 

 substitutes for human labour, and enable suitable engines to 

 rescue fish, which are swimming along their boundaries in the 

 healthiest and fattest condition, from the jaws of seals and por- 

 poises, and make them " a feast for our citizens."* 



* In the part of the river (Shannon) where the stake-net fishery has taken 

 place, the number of porpoises is quite enormous ; there are also seals ; and, in 

 the construction that has been put upon the law (of 10 Charles I.), a general 

 impression has gone abroad, not that we allow the fish to g<3 to the upper waters 

 to be taken for the purposes of human food, but that we rather leave the fish to 



