82 



been accompanied by the strenuous exertion of all those com- 

 pensatory provisions which were intended to remove the force 

 of objections to it. 



The law failed to provide the public with sufficient powers to 

 vindicate their rights, which remained infringed through their 

 ignorance of the real state of the law, or want of means to try 

 a question of title. On the other hand, sufficient powers to 

 repress infringements on private rights do not appear to have 

 been given.* 



After the passing of the Act, a great increase followed in the 

 use of fixed engines. Numbers, who had previously left the 

 common freedom of piscary unmolested, set them up upon the 

 authority of the new law, and in some cases their title to do so 

 remains questionable.! 



The exercise of such powers, of which the rights are uncer- 

 tain, or the means to try them are not available, must tend 

 greatly to engender those ill feelings between the rich and the 

 poor so hurtful to both, and to* add to that insecurity of pro- 

 perty in Ireland which has long been a cause of her unpros- 

 perous state. 



Taking, as the object of paramount importance with regard 

 to the Salmon Fisheries, the adopting that system which will 

 raise them, as a national property, to their 'maximum, state of 

 permanent productiveness of this fish in its best condition as an 

 article of commerce, as laid down for the policy of the enact- 

 ment of 1842, and as the principle on which its provisions were 

 based, :f that, secondary to it, will be the securing rights or 



* The Lessees of the northern rivers, held under the Irish Society, complain 

 that ' the greatest defect in the present laws is, that they are not sufficiently 

 stringent against poachers in the close season salmon being killed while spawn- 

 ing, in enormous quantities;' and that 'poaching in the open season has ex- 

 tended to an extravagant length, since angling became a free trade, in conse- 

 quence of the absence of the magistrate's jurisdiction at that season.' They 

 consider that under all the circumstances of the state of the law and of the 

 country, the attempt to enlist anglers for protection has failed. 



t The law as it stands at present, according to the 5 & 6 of Victoria, 

 is in opposition to Magna Charta, and the common-law right ; and so it was 

 declared in point of fact by the judges, because they laid it down, that not- 

 withstanding that the 5 & 6 Victoria gave permission to parties to erect 

 Scotch weirs where- the river was more than three-quarters of a mile wide, yet 

 that neither that law, nor any other law, can or does interfere with the common- 

 law right; the common-law right being this, that no man can put up an 

 obstruction, either to navigation, or to the passage of fish in the king's high- 

 way, or in the tideway. With regard to the other portion of that clause which 

 says that a person who has maintained a Scotch weir over twenty years, where 

 the river is not three-quarters of a mile wide, shall be entitled to fish that weir ; 

 there again, the judges have declared that that is illegal, inasmuch as it is a 

 fixed engine, and an obstruction both to navigation and to the passage of fish ; 

 and although the Act of Parliament does in a certain degree legalize it, yet it 

 does legalize it against the common law of the land Evidence of the Earl of 

 Glengall, p. 149. 



$ Pamphlet on the Irish Fisheries Bill, 1842. See also Seventeenth Report 

 of the Commissioners, quoted in page 74. 



