‘The angler is sentinel’: river fishermen on new efforts to save Irish salmon stocks

On the sun-dappled river Lee, salmon leap about in the water under the looming edifice of the Inniscarra Dam. They are, in the words of angler Alan Nolan, “the king of fish”. When he speaks about salmon fishing being “a religion”, he’s not kidding.

“Did you ever hear the expression ‘my heart missed a beat’?” he asks, eyes glinting behind his sunglasses.

“All you can see is the line cutting through the water like a knife ... And you could be 10 minutes into the fight and you see a flash and you’d say: ‘Oh Jesus, he’s 15lbs.’ And then you’re like, ‘Alright, no problem’, and then – boof! – the hook comes out of him.”

And a laugh. The one that got away.

It’s a tale as old as time but for the members of the Lee Salmon Anglers Club who fish this particular stretch of the river – operating mainly out of a green container beside a working yard, fuelled by tea and biscuits as they observe the river from under a sycamore tree – the story could be changing.

A consultation on proposals for the management of Ireland’s wild Atlantic salmon fisheries from 2027 closed in October. That followed a review by Inland Fisheries Ireland (IFI) of the wild Atlantic salmon management network, which found that “populations are under pressure across their entire North Atlantic range”.

It found many populations at their lowest levels in decades and said “urgent, transformative change” was required to halt the decline.

The numbers are stark. Wild salmon returns to Ireland have fallen from more than one million per year in the 1970s to fewer than 200,000 in recent years, while only 28 per cent of Ireland’s salmon rivers are deemed to have healthy stocks.

The IFI report also stressed the need to maximise the number of smolts, or young salmon, produced from our rivers to enter the ocean and to improve their health and resilience.

[ Wild salmon are on the verge of extinctionOpens in new window ]

There is a range of proposals, but measures could include reducing the season, closing off rivers, or permitting catch and release only. Individual rivers open at different times and sometimes on specific dates.

The river Lee closed to salmon fishing at the end of September, but according to Paul Lawton – a bus driver and chair of the Lee Salmon Anglers Club – it used to be October 12th. That slipped back in years past and now the worry is that it will be curtailed further.

As his Maltese dog, Holly, bounces around the river bank, Lawton produces a sheet with numbers on it, quota and surplus data for all the rivers, as well as the breakdown of who gets what between anglers and commercial fishing.

“Like, why hit the anglers?” Lawton asks.

He sees more pressing issues elsewhere – bigger catches from other types of fishing, lice escaping from farmed salmon and impacting wild salmon, a failure to protect rivers and habitats, and pollution.

Ray Burns, also a member of the club, says there’s now a “perfect storm”.

“Our rivers are like the veins of our country,” he says, describing a “slow demise” in the country’s ecosystems.

Salmon are born in freshwater then travel thousands of kilometres to the ocean to live as adults before returning to the same river where they hatched to spawn.

Club members feel any new limits on anglers will simply reduce the already small amount of fish they catch in an average season without tackling the larger issues.

“I can tell you straight out,” Sean Nason says, when asked how many salmon he caught this past season. “I caught three, and I didn’t get a fish after June 14th.

“It’s a needle in a haystack at times here. Pure luck. Right place, right time.”

The club has 150 members, aged “from eight to 80”, Lawton says, but the age profile is going up.

Today, Richard Hoare and his friend, Patsy Quilligan, are on the riverbank. Hoare is 60 years in Cork and jokes that Patsy – also in his 80s – keeps saying he’s “a blow-in”.

“Every day, if I can, I come out,” he says, pointing to his berth on the riverbank. “I just sit in the one place.”

Quilligan used to be a docker and a fisherman. “My grandfather was a fisherman, my father was a fisherman. I made a living out of fishing. All the kids’ confirmations, first communions, everything was bought with fishing.”

Lawton, who is also chair of the Federation of Irish Salmon and Seatrout Anglers, says the club is “like a men’s shed”.

“Then they sit down there on the benches, and they can make a cup of tea, cup of coffee, cup of soup, whatever. They bring out a bottle of beer, and they sit down there, and they have a chat for a couple of hours.”

The Lee Salmon Anglers Club has listed the various reasons for the “total rejection” of the proposals, taking in “no accountability” for water quality and pollution, man-made barriers that impede the salmon as they try to make their way back in to spawn (the Inniscarra Dam and various other weirs and dams), as well as poaching, insufficient IFI officers and more.

However, Salmon Watch Ireland (SWI) has welcomed what it called “the direction of the proposed reforms and their emphasis on conserving wild Atlantic salmon”.

The organisation said it supported river-by-river management. John Murphy, its chief executive, says a buffer – a precautionary margin that ensures an entire estimated surplus of salmon cannot be caught – is essential.

“We anticipate that all rivers will be open for angling but not harvesting except where data indicates that stocks are in surplus with a buffer,” he says. “However we, as in our submission, do not want the season curtailed. We support harvest by recreational means within realistic individual limits.”

SWI also proposes a national annual retention limit of three salmon per angler across all rivers and a daily limit of one, and it backs moves to curtail harvest in September.

“There will never be abundance if conditions and survival do not increase substantially at sea,” Murphy says, before turning his attention back to freshwater environs.

“It is disappointing that data collection is only around 50 per cent from anglers – this needs to be addressed. Catch returns are vital.”

Back by the Lee, we take a short spin to the Inniscarra Dam, a vast facility that allows for the salmon at its base to make their way up river.

. Both he and Nolan, the club secretary, believe closing off a river won’t help deal with falling salmon numbers.

“Anglers are like the people who see what’s happening in the river, and they report it,” Nolan says. “If you have no anglers out in the river, [should] you close a river, then all the faults and failures of pollution, dead fish, all the other flaws go unreported. The angler is like a sentinel.”

Nolan, a former soldier who served in Lebanon, Bosnia and elsewhere, believes the dam itself is outmoded.

“The entire area above the dam becomes an artificial reservoir, which is an ecological dead zone for fish like salmon,” he says.

The fish pop up and skirt around the surface of the water. The mythical, mystical salmon, which changes colour and swims back up river, propels itself against the current and through the air, driven by elemental forces.

“Imagine a human can hook a salmon, something so magnificent, and you’re connected by this thing called monofilament, which is nylon,” Nolan says.

“It’s material, right? Synthetic, which is very, very similar to spider’s web, and all the energy from the fish is transmitted down into your arm and into your body like an electrical current.”