JULY 185 



depopulated in a single day. The economist grudges the 

 direful diligence, the lawless devices, which are reducing 

 salmon to the vanishing-point, and laments the waste of 

 an asset which, rightly administered, would attract a full 

 share of the wealth which is lavished upon Scottish and 

 Scandinavian rivers. There is nothing for which so many 

 people are ready to pay liberally as salmon-fishing ; no- 

 where that it is so plentifully provided by nature as in 

 Ireland. 



The Erne has been longer in succumbing to ill-treat- 

 ment than other rivers because of its glorious capability, 

 but it is going like the rest. Until lately, the vast 

 expanse of Lough Erne kept the river full during the 

 summer months; but the drainage works have altered 

 that. The whole level of the lough has been lowered 

 three feet or thereby, all to save some hundreds of acres 

 of bog- land ; the floodgates are regulated so as to run the 

 water off as quickly as possible, and without regard to the 

 fishing interest, so a far larger proportion of salmon than 

 of yore fall victims to the deadly boxes or ' cruive-dyke ' 

 at the mouth and to the nets in the estuary. The use of 

 drift-nets, a destructive device which has been pronounced 

 by the English and Scottish courts to be a fixed engine, 

 and therefore illegal in an estuary, has been largely 

 extended in Donegal Bay, and must ultimately put the 

 finishing- stroke to the Erne as an angling river unless 

 effective means are taken to stop them. But who is so 

 sanguine as to look for energy in anything Irish except 

 poaching ? Of the spawning salmon that run up the 

 numerous affluents of Lough Erne, very few survive to 

 taste the salt water again. Darkly discoloured and 

 unsightly with slime, as spawning salmon always are, 



