Sir, - Joan Tobin refers to a difference of opinion between trout and pike anglers over the pike management element of the Corrib System Development Plan (Out of the West, April 6th). Unfortunately the piece ignores some important aspects. An impression is given that all trout anglers in the West support pike control. This is simply not true, as a poll of local trout clubs would reveal. Many are against the use of barbaric gill nets for pike removal due to the large number of trout that have been captured. These same gill nets miss the more numerous small pike.
You report that trout anglers believe that pike stocks will "ultimately destroy the trout population". Why, after hundreds of years of co-existence, hasn't this happened already? If culling pike preserves trout stocks, why, after 40 years of culling on the western loughs (1950-1990) were the trout fishing returns lower than in years before culling commenced?
Why have trout-angling bodies in Britain, France and Holland urged the Western Regional Fisheries Board not to remove bigger pike as part of the pike management programme? Could it be that their experience shows that such a scheme is completely worthless?
You refer to the preponderance of pike waters in Ireland. Yet your writer falls for the fanciful notion that only 11 trout waters remain. Anybody can pick up a copy of Peter O'Reilly's Trout Waters in Ireland to read of hundreds of waters where wild brown trout can be found. But the number of respective venues is irrelevant. The facts, as supported by scientific analysis from across the globe, are that the removal of large pike from a water simply increases the numbers of smaller pike, leading to greater predation on trout stocks.
Pike angling groups have made no objections to the removal of smaller pike from the western loughs; we simply want to leave the bigger fish alone to fuel angling tourism which extends the tourist season by some six months as workers employed for the duration of the project, let everyone involved in economic development around the loughs remember that dozens of permanent jobs could be created in angling tourism if you stop killing the goose that lays the golden egg - or in this case the pike that draws overseas visitors at a time when visiting trout anglers are as rare as goose teeth! - Yours, etc.,
David Overy
Pike Anglers' Clubof Great Britain and Ireland, Portmarnock, Co Dublin.