James Browne TD pictured beside the river Slaney. Pic: John Walsh
THE CLOSURE of fishing on the River Slaney for 2017 has caused outrage amongst Wexford’s angling community who say that the reason given makes no sense given that the river has operated a ‘Catch and Release’ policy for the last seven years.
Sean O’Brien of the Slaney River Trust said the decision was “absolutely ridiculous”, remarking: “We fish with flies. We hook them, land them and put them back again.”
He said the reason given for closing the river was the lack of fingerlings in the small streams but he said that the fishermen were not responsible for this.
He referred to a ‘tail-race’ structure at Clohammon, effectively a gate supposed to stop fish from entering a connecting area where electricity is being generated, but said that it was not working and fish were getting caught in the tail-race and dying before they reached Bunclody.
He said they had seen hundreds of fish taken out of it in recent years and they were calling for some action to be taken that would stop them getting stranded in the apparatus in the first place.
Mr. O’Brien said that a delegation from the River Trust had met with Minister Sean Kyne and given him an account of what was happening.
“He told us that he would review the situation in January. But at the moment, there are no fishermen on the river to protect it, and Fisheries officers are thin on the ground. The tail-race is the problem because there is such a swell of water around it that the fish are not swimming any further up the river but getting caught in this.
“But no one is listening to us. The River Slaney has been neglected for years. We’re calling for the government to bring the EU directive into play that dictates for free passage up and down the river for fish.”
He added that the closing of the river had a massive impact locally, particularly in Bunclody where the local fishing is a tourist draw.
“The River Slaney used to be the best Spring river in Ireland, if not in Europe. But the fish can’t come up this far. The fishermen are very annoyed about the whole situation. We’re doing no harm and taking us off the river is ridiculous.”
Fianna Fáil TD James Browne also voiced his disappointment at the decision, saying he had been in written contact with the Minister urging him to reconsider the matter as the River Slaney was a vital natural resource for the county.
He is calling for the Department to implement a River Recovery Scheme with a view to making the river viable again for fishing and also to implement measures to prevent the fish being trapped in the tail-race at Clohammon.
He added: “It is difficult to see how current management of fish stocks on the River Slaney is in compliance with European environmental directives.”
Speaking to this newspaper, Deputy Browne added that he believed that there was a lot of poaching occurring on the river and if the anglers were gone, the Fisheries did not have the staff to police this.
He agreed that something needed to be done at Clohammon to divert the fish away from the tail-race as the grid was too wide to stop fish getting through.
“Stopping catch-and-release to save the fish population is like putting your finger on a hole in a dyke. It needs proper river management.”
He added that the action taken was no more than a token gesture: “I think the department acknowledged that it needed to do something and stopping the catch-and-release was a case of saying ‘Here, we’ll do this’. But it’s not the plan that’s needed here.”
