Drive up the eastern side of Inishowen to the small Donegal fishing port of Greencastle and you begin to understand how certain geographical outposts gain reputations for their independent spirit.
Greencastle has been synonymous with the sea for centuries – it is home to both the Inishowen Maritime Museum and the National Fisheries College of Ireland – and every part of the town, which is one of Ireland’s principal fishery harbours, looks across the mouth of Lough Foyle to the open ocean beyond.
Cara Rawdon, the son of a publican in nearby Moville, was drawn to Greencastle's trawlers when he left school. "I came to the harbour looking for a job. The fishermen were the only ones making money then. There were 42 trawlers in Greencastle when I got my first boat, the Twilight Star, a 56ft timber boat, in 1981. It cost £32,000, with a deposit of £8,000 and an interest rate of 21 per cent on the rest."
Before that purchase Rawdon had spent two years fishing for prawns from Howth, on the north side of Dublin Bay. He had also worked on herring and white-fish boats out of Greencastle and Killybegs. "Herring became very valuable when the North Sea was closed for conservation purposes. I remember a box of herring move from £5 to £20, which allowed me to save for the deposit on my second boat, the Albatross, an 82ft timber boat, in 1986. I continued to fish on the boats in Killybegs and had someone fish my boat from Greencastle."
He sold that boat a few years later, continued to fish on other boats, and bought Draíocht na Mara, an 86ft steel vessel, in 1997. "You could catch whatever you wanted then. It was open fishing. There were bigger and better boats, trying to catch more and more. You were judged by how much you could catch."
Now, he says, all that has changed. “Last month I had reached my whiting quota in the first week. I had plenty of my quota left for hake and pollock, but I couldn’t find them.”
Rawdon says Ireland got a raw deal when the fishing waters around the coast were divided between the European fishing fleets. “The Irish fleet get 20 per cent of the total allowable catch,” he says. But Rawdon accepts that overfishing in the 1990s led to later restrictions. “There was no management of stocks. The wrong size of nets was used. A little conservation then would have saved us a lot of pain later. The writing was on the wall in the 1990s.”
Although an estimated 80 per cent of all species are overfished, overfishing in northern and western Europe has fallen from 86 per cent of stocks in 2009 to 41 per cent of stocks in 2014. Nevertheless, the common fisheries policy would like to see the Irish fishing fleet reduced further.
Catherine R
Just before it heads out of the harbour on a calm, sunny morning, Rawdon takes us aboard
Catherine R
, the 11-year-old trawler he bought two years ago to replace a larger boat that had cost €2.8 million in 2001, and that became too expensive to run after the reduction in white-fish quotas.
Catherine R's small cabin has an electronic log and digital maps of the seabed, so the skipper can chart a course between shipwrecks to find the best white fish. "It's a much more technical and highly skilled job nowadays," Rawdon says.
The most important fixtures on the boat must be the blue steel trawl doors, which help to keep the net open to take in its catch near the bottom of the sea. The catch is then transferred to metal trays to be gutted, washed, graded and refrigerated. “It’s a 24-hour job, seven days a week, when we’re out at sea. The bell rings every five hours to pull the nets in. You see some beautiful sunrises, but there are long hours on your feet,” Rawdon says. “We’d expect about a tonne of fish per haul and four hauls a day. We need to make about €3,000 a day to cover all costs, if you consider we burn about 2,000l of fuel each day. You have to be focused, determined and hard-working, but there is huge job satisfaction.”
Below Catherine R's deck are the crew's quarters – kitchen, eating area, shower and toilet – with room for seven people to sleep.
A transmitter on the boat allows fishery regulators to monitor Catherine R's location. "We compare it to tagging a criminal," Rawdon says, only half joking. The most difficult part of the job, he says, is not the weather but the regulations.
“It used to be that failure to comply with the quotas resulted in an automatic confiscation of all your catch and fishing gear, but now there is a system of penalty points if you are in breach of the quotas or use the incorrect nets. When you reach the maximum penalty points your boat can be tied up for three months.”
In his office in the nearby shipyard Rawdon gets out maps of restricted fishing zones around Ireland. One conservation area is just outside the port: the Cape ground has been completely closed to fishing for 10 years.
Conservation lobby
He is not convinced by the conservation lobby that has built up around commercial fishing. “The people who shout loudest about conservation are the ones whose lives are the least affected. The staff in the Department of the Marine and the Sea Fisheries Protection Authority get their wages every week. We are the only ones producing anything in this industry. They exist because we exist, yet we have become the enemy. Sometimes I ask if people still want fish and, if so, who’s going to want to catch them. There are no young skippers coming along.”
As chairman of the Irish Fish Producers’ Organisation Rawdon regularly meets officials. “The problem is that no one is listening to us. No one really cares what we think.”
Rawdon is disappointed by the success of what he believes to be misguided campaigns, particularly Fish Fight, which the British broadcaster and food writer Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall launched in 2010 to end discards, the practice of throwing dead or dying fish back into the sea soon after they had been caught, largely in order to stay within quotas. His online petition and wider social media campaign helped to persuade the EU to change its mind about discards. The first phase of a ban – formally known as the landing obligation – came into effect last January, and will extend to catches of cod and other species next January.
Rawdon says the new system is unworkable and that, instead of forcing fishermen to bring ashore every fish they catch, the EU should focus on increasing the legal size of fishing-net mesh, so that smaller species and juvenile white fish can escape. Combined with the closed cod-fishing areas and the existing quota system, this should be enough to conserve stocks, he says.
“In the Celtic Sea [south of Ireland and northwest of France] the mesh size has been increased again to protect oncoming stocks. Irish fishermen want to know how the discard ban will improve conservation.
“We will have hundreds of boxes of fish coming ashore that can’t be sold. It’s a politically motivated publicity stunt. We have no voice any more and we are considering withdrawing from the discards implementation group,” he says, referring to the committee that Simon Coveney appointed after the change in the common fisheries policy.
Rawdon says that stringent enforcement of quotas, severe penalties for getting it wrong and restrictions on boat sizes would amount to a better approach.
Now in his 50s, with four grown-up daughters, Rawdon sounds disheartened about his line of work. “It’s tough on a family in the early years. You’re always packing a bag. The wives and families ashore rear the children on their own. You sacrifice a lot to be a successful fisherman.” He says he believes that skipper-owned fishing trawlers like his are on the way out. “There are all slowly but surely fading away. Something we should be proud of in Ireland is a dying trade.”
