REMARKS ON IRISH FISHERIES 



the genuine Irishmen, most of them being of English 

 or Scotch descent ; and they are far more thrifty and 

 business-like than the men whose country has adopted 

 them. 



On Tory Island an islet three miles long and less 

 than a mile broad, which lies about ten miles north-east 

 of the Bloody Foreland, there is a tiny colony of real 

 Irish fishers ; these are they who, it is reported, feed their 

 cattle on fish. They and the Donegal men who fish 

 between Lough Swilly and the Foreland, have an excep- 

 tionally dangerous ground upon which to work, for there, 

 apart from the awful, rocky reef that runs out from Tory, 

 the Atlantic can be its roughest, so much so that often 

 no boat can pass from the island to the mainland for five 

 or six weeks at a time. The islanders are therefore 

 obliged to store their fish alive in salt-water reservoirs, 

 and perhaps it is from this fact that Irish fishermen have 

 been accused of tethering valuable fish like soles and 

 turbots by the tail, and letting them swim about till the 

 steam-carrier comes to fetch them. 



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