Fish stocks on the Blackwater in North Cork could take ten years or more to recover following what anglers estimate to be the deaths of more than 40,000 fish on the river, according to the operator of a fishery on the river.
The chairman of Killavullen Angling Club, Conor Arnold. said fish are continuing to die along a 30-kilometre stretch of the Blackwater from Clonmeen, near Banteer, all the way downstream through Mallow to approximately two kilometres downstream of Killavullen Bridge.
“It’s very hard to put an exact number but we applied a bit of logic to the number of fish we were taking out and we are definitely in the tens of thousands – it’s definitely over 40,000 from we can estimate. It’s phenomenal: the river is dying before our eyes.
“Brown trout are indigenous to the river and while it’s hard to estimate, such is the scale of the fish kill, I would estimate it will take eight to ten years for the stock to replenish while it will also have a huge impact on salmon as two to three generations of salmon have been wiped out.
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“Now the salmon smolt have gone out to sea and will come back next year but after that for the next 12 to 15 years, the number of returning salmon will be affected by this – it’s going to seriously damaging for one of the primary salmon and trout fisheries in Europe.”
Dan Dennehy, club secretary of Kanturk and District Trout Anglers, described the fish kill as “devastating” and “off the scale”.
“Salmon, eels, trout – thousands and thousands of them. We don’t know the extent of it or what is causing it,” he said.
He said it was one of the biggest fish kills he was aware of in the State. “There is a load of unanswered questions in relation to it,” he added.
Mr Dennehy said Minister of State at the Department of Agriculture Timmy Dooley and Cork North-West TD and Minister of State Michael Moynihan visited the river and met local anglers.
“I presume they will bring in experts to regenerate the river,” he said. “It is desperate to see. If you see the glory of the trout in the river and then you see them dead there is no comparison. The numbers are just savage.”
Mr Arnold said it is baffling, if the fish kill was due solely to environmental factors such as low water levels and high water temperatures, why are fishing not dying upstream of the start point at Clonmeen where water levels are similarly low and water temperatures similarly high.
Meanwhile Inland Fisheries Ireland have confirmed that their senior management will meet with angler representatives on Friday to discuss the fish kill which they estimate has resulted in the deaths of between 8,000 and 10,000 fish in the Blackwater in the past ten days.
IFI acting chief executive Suzanne Campion said the fish kill was “distressing” for anglers and staff who have cared for the fish in the catchment. She said the body awaits a report from the Marine Institute as it tries to establish a cause.
IFI said that estimating the number of mortalities in a fish kill is always difficult as many dead fish will be taken by predators, caught under banks out of sight, will sink to the bottom of pools or be washed downstream.
It is also possible that the same fish may be reported by different observers.
