THE IRISH FISHERIES 



the Board of Trade reports say very differently ; to 

 wit, that shoals of both herring and mackerel have been 

 allowed to pass the coasts through the indolence of the 

 fishermen and the scarcity of nets ; and that, till the 

 " foreign " trawlers came, soles, which often abound 

 round there, were never caught at all. Twenty years 

 ago lobsters and crabs could almost have been shovelled 

 on board the smacks round the west coast of Ireland, 

 and such may still be the case. 



Out of a population of four and a half millions, twelve 

 thousand people are now engaged in fishing ; the trade 

 is controlled by a Congested Board, and the coast is 

 divided up into centres, of which Dublin, Cork, Sligo, 

 and Galway are the chief. 



Every imaginable form of craft may be seen in these 

 waters, cutters and luggers being the most popular ; and 

 the crews include negroes, Welshmen, Englishmen, Manx- 

 men, and an occasional woman. The typical Hibernian 

 fisherman is not the same being on land as he is at sea. 

 Once persuade him to buckle to his work, once let him 

 get on board his smack, and his seamanship and his energy 

 would be a valuable object-lesson to some of the East 

 Coast men. He is not infrequently a bold romancer 

 I have seldom met an Irish fisherman who had not, at 

 some period of his existence, caught a conger that had at 

 least ten other eels in its stomach, graduated and arranged 

 like the wooden puzzle eggs that the London hawkers 

 sell, one inside the other; and he will sometimes do 

 what the East Coast and Cornish fishers strongly set their 

 faces against, take beer or whisky on board ; but, these 

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