OPINION:Paddy O'Flaherty spent his life protecting the quality of Irish fishing only to have his heart broken by State neglect, writes Ann Marie Hourihane
YOU SEE terrible things on television. Murder, rape, betrayal and barefaced lies - and that's just the news. But nothing was sadder on television last week than the story of the man whose heart had been broken by fish.
All his adult life Paddy O'Flaherty worked as a fisheries inspector in his native Connemara. He became a fisheries inspector to keep the fish of Ireland for future generations, as his father and his grandfather had done before him. After 40 years of this work he retired early.
"There is nothing in the rivers only sand," he said.
Paddy O'Flaherty himself is a member of an endangered species: an Irish person who appears on television and doesn't put a tooth in it.
From the moment he showed us abandoned fish cages lying on the shore - "that is a disgrace" said Paddy O'Flaherty - to shots of him walking sadly with his sheepdogs, the viewer trusted him.
The makers of the programme trusted him also. There was no other voice on this documentary, which included excellent footage from 20 years ago, in which a younger, happier Paddy O'Flaherty outlined his determination to keep the fish and rivers healthy for the people of Ireland. He embodied the virtues of a conscientious, highly-motivated public servant.
His father and grandfather were fishing wardens for an aristocrat who had a fine fishery near Screebe lake in Connemara. As a child Paddy O'Flaherty watched the fish jumping in Screebe lake; it was these fish that were under his family's care. When he was a young man the visiting fishermen would come ashore to have lunch in a little lodge.
Paddy and his father and the other older men took their lunch outside the lodge, near the area that the visiting fishermen used as a latrine.
One day the young Paddy, overcome by the stink of the latrine, told the visiting fishermen that he would eat his lunch outside no longer.
His father and the other older men were very much opposed to him doing this, but they ate their lunch in the lodge ever afterwards.
This then was the repugnant social hierarchy in which Paddy O'Flaherty grew up. What a relief when that hierarchy withered, and he could work, not for an aristocrat, but for his fellow citizens.
But it was not a relief for long. The fish farms came, funded by grants from the Irish Government. Blind, lice-infested fish had their pens flooded with one chemical after another. (There was footage of sinister blue chemical being pumped into fish farms).
Half the time, Paddy O'Flaherty said, no one really knew which chemicals were being used.
The wild sea trout started coming back from the sea earlier and earlier and thinner and thinner. There was footage of fish with their skin floating off them. The farmed fish frequently died, and were then hidden.
There was footage of tons of dead fish being shovelled by JCB into a bog.
The problem, as Paddy O'Flaherty saw it, was that no government department or agency would take responsibility for the fish farms. By the time that question was decided, it was too late.
Paddy O'Flaherty did not maintain that fish farming was the only factor in decimating the country's fish. He mentioned sheep farming, but did not mention slurry spreading which, presumably, is not a major feature of Connemara farming.
However, fish farming was enough of a problem for him to speak out against it. He says now he is not sorry that he spoke out; that in fact he is proud to have done so. He should have been stronger in his criticism.
The fish farms provided jobs for his friends and neighbours, in an area which has been scandalously neglected. As a result of his criticisms Paddy O'Flaherty was harassed. There was not much detail of this harassment given in the programme.
Being a fishing inspector is never going to make you popular - you've got to be very clear where your duty lies.
As Paddy O'Flaherty brought us on a tour of the desert that was once in his charge you saw that his heart was broken. For a non-fishing city dweller who knows nothing about fishing this was a shocking sight.
The programme was called Saol an Mhaoir, which means, apparently, "Life Of A Warden" . It was directed by Seán Ó Cualain, who is not some media blow-in to Connemara, but a local man who has members of his own family working in the fish farming industry. It was part of the Cogar series on TG4, the Irish language station.
Saol an Mhaoir was originally shown last spring. This was a repeat, and a timely one, in the week that the EU is trying, yet again, to stop us Irish people from destroying our water.
To judge from this programme, in Paddy O'Flaherty's lifetime we have become a nation which uses the environment as its latrine.
Inquiries put to other fishing people confirmed this impression. From the Dublin fisherman who once stood on the shores of Lough Sheelin, Co Cavan, and wept when he saw what had been done to it - "Nobody cares," said the Dublin angler - to the scientist who, when asked about Paddy O'Flaherty's views, responded curtly: "He is right."
Brussels papers, please copy.