Salmon is the fish to eat, preferably caught by someone you know, if not yourself, and preferably smoked by the same. Some people find sea trout even better and finer. But there is another fishery, this time shellfish, which is an important part of the marginal income of people living along the coast. No, not oysters, of course, nor mussels, and not scallops, the aristocrat of all, nor razorfish. Just the humble periwinkle, known in some parts as willicks. You see them all over the rocks and will have come across people gathering them in a sack. BIM, that's Bord Iascaigh Mhara, estimated, officially, that the market value of the periwinkle export was £1.22 million and £2.11 million in 1977 and 1966 respectively, but as the operations of the periwinkle market are, according to an article by Breda Shannon in The Irish Skipper magazine "outside quantifiable parameters", a more realistic export value would be between £3.5 and £5 million. For much of the trade is carried on by small wholesalers who are not required by law to submit VAT returns.
It seems there are three winkles, the flat-topped, the rough and the periwinkle, which is the edible one. That is the pointy one which children early learn can be picked off the rock with some ease. The periwinkle's market is said, in the above article to be with the continent largely, and mostly France and Spain. And Elizabeth David in her book French Provincial Cooking gives the winkle honourable mention. At the Hotel de la Poste at Duclair, overlooking the Seine, she writes of a succession of little dishes as, among others, "containing plain boiled langoustines (we used to know them as Dublin Bay prawns before they turned into Venetian scampi) . . . winkles, a cork stuck with pins to extract them from their shells . . ." and more. Yes, the pins. Is it not a fact that people with large baskets over their arms used to visit Dublin pubs bearing shellfish, not excluding the humble winkle. They would have needed the pins, too.
Rising prosperity and the culling of small winkles threatens the trade. The Department of the Marine is looking seriously into this market, and research is being conducted by the UCC and UCG Aquaculture departments, according to this intriguing article in The Irish Skipper.