IF YOU ever wondered just how badly lice from salmon farms affect sea trout, let alone wild salmon, nip over to Connemara for a look at the Ballynahinch river system.
It is bad over here, particularly on the west coast, but if ever there was a very obvious and demonstrable set of circumstances to show that salmon farms and wild salmon and sea trout don't mix this is it.
The Ballynahinch empties into Bertraghbo
y Bay, which was one of the best sea trout fisheries on the west of Ireland in the past. So needless to say that was where they decided to put a fish farm in 1988, although to be fair(ish) this was in the days before anyone quite understood the effects of breeding thousands of fish in cages (in the same way, no-one knows the long-term effects of letting beavers loose in Argyll).
So what happened when the cages appeared? The wild fish stocks crashed. The annual sea trout catch dwindled from 5,500 a year to 100 and the salmon catch from 500 to 50. With more that 1 million salmon in 30 cages to feed on, the sea lice population in Bertraghboy Bay exploded. As soon as the wild fish entered saltwater they were pretty well eaten alive. So far so normal. The story has been much the same here where Loch Maree, a once-famous sea trout fishery, has been decimated thanks to the predations of lice from salmon farms.
And it is not just the wild salmon that go. The angling visitors, who are just the sort of tourists everyone wants, gradually melt away – instead of fishing all day and only coming back in the evening to spend a great deal of money on food and drink. And the women go shopping.
Then, miraculously, in 2004 the Bertraghboy Bay salmon farm went belly up yet again, so they filled the cages with cod, which are of no interest to sea lice. The lice either died of starvation or sugared off in search of protein from one of the other salmon farms round Ireland's west coast. And here's the rub. From 2004 until 2008, the sea trout rod catches at Ballynahinch rose from 100 to 1,500 and the salmon catches have increased from 50 to 270.
You may imagine that there was much rejoicing, jigging, craic and general Irishness, notably at the local Ballynahinch Castle Hotel. Of course you can guess what happened next. "They" decided to bring back the farmed salmon. That was at the end of last year. No-one is now in any doubt that the lice will return in great quantities and the wild fish will get eaten alive at a crucial moment in the recovery of the stocks.
Out of all the cases in Scotland and Ireland, the destruction of the Ballynahinch wild stocks, their return and now their inevitable demise, is the best example of what happens when you put farmed salmon in the way of migratory fish, and what happens when you take them away. The Irish angling lobby are now looking to the Scots to join them in a joint approach to Europe.
The Irish ministry responsible for fish farming says feebly that aquaculture and rod and line tourism can co-exist. You will hear a similar bleat from the Government this side of the water. Indeed fish farming and angling can co-exist. But it means either moving the cages out of the path of migratory fish or bringing production ashore. Or both.
