Chapter 1: Why does Ireland import 80% of its fish despite being surrounded by fishing ports?
So sticking with our food security theme this morning, not only does Ireland import 80% of the baby potatoes we eat from France, or we did last year anyway, but this island nation, surrounded by fishing ports, imports 80% of the fish that we eat. Yes, of course, a part of that is because fish stocks of some species in European waters are dangerously low.
But a large part of it is also because we have very, very conservative tastes when it comes to fish. And if we got a bit braver in what we eat, we could also get a bit more food secure. Lorna Siggins jumped on board this conundrum for us on a recent trip to Hoth Harbour where she met Sean Doran.
So we're just looking out of the harbour here now, Sean, and this would have been full of boats.
Yeah. What I miss more is the people. It used to take me an hour and a half or two hours to walk up and down the harbour because you'd be stopping and chatting to the guys from all over the coast, you know, the Galway lads and the Greencastle lads and the Castletown Bearmen and all that sort of stuff.
And then you'd be called about every second boat for a cup of tea and a chat or to give them a hand doing small jobs, holding the net from ending or whatever. And all that's nearly gone.
Sean Doran finds it particularly frustrating to see fish caught in Irish waters being shipped overseas. It is such a feature of fishing in Hoth now that he has renamed part of the harbour the Belgian Pier.
Yeah, the middle pier, the Belgian pier, yeah. It is used by Irish trawlers, but the Belgian boats come in, land over there, and then fish go straight on to Eulalia and straight to Belgium. The logic of air miles and food miles and that sort of stuff doesn't really work out that, you know, in my head anyway. Whereas, you know, we have a fleet of boats.
that if we had the quota, we could fish that fishery. The Belgian quota is just over 400 tonnes and the Irish quota is less than 50 for black salt. You know, one of the main fisheries left in the Irish Sea that's fully viable. And we would just like some more of that ourselves. I mean, I don't think it's unreasonable to ask.
And, I mean, when we have boats and the men who can go and fish it, why should we be looking out our window, looking at boats catching fish that we could catch and our boats are tied up for lack of quota?
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Chapter 2: What challenges do local fishmongers face in sourcing fish?
Liam is the sort of customer that Stefan Griesbach works hard to wean off cod as he believes Irish fish buyers need to be more adventurous if he is to stay in business.
We want to be inclusive so there's a lot of fish that we're selling that are generic fish like salmon, cod, egg. And then we also try to focus as well on other species. Today we would have wool fish on the counter. We have magrum, some fish eggs, cod roe. We have some very small plates here, but they're small, but they're cheap and they're very good.
You have a sign here, Guess Who?
Guess Who, yes. Sometimes we come across a specie and we get it once in a blue moon and we might not have a label for it. We put a label called Guess Who, which catches the attention of the customer. We describe how to cook it, we describe the fish, where it's caught, we just go into detail about the story behind the fish.
So the guess who today is the magrim, which is, we're catching a lot of it in Ireland, but 99.9% of it is exported to Spain. It's a fish that needs to be sold and cooked on the bone. Like we often would have people coming here looking for black sole. Black sole now is very, very expensive, very, very hard to get. Magrim is a much cheaper fish, but people have that idea of one black sole.
How would you cook that?
I would just pan fry it, just like a black sole. A little bit of flour with a bit of butter, yeah, at the end. Never put butter on the beginning. Yeah, megrim is a good fish. You know, it's not like, no, it's not a black sole. No, a black sole today would be 45 euro kilo. Have a good weekend. Bye. The Irish fishing industry is in massive trouble.
From when I started 20 years ago, where my biggest problem was not to buy too much fish, to now struggling to find what we need. We used to have an wholesale business selling to all the restaurants in Galway. And eight years ago, I decided to switch off, stop the wholesale, just to focus on the retail. Because it was harder and harder to get fish, and I could not supply a restaurant.
Or I would have had to kind of make compromise on the quality, on the origin, the sourcing of the fish. so we stuck to Irish fish, which is harder and harder to get. The reality is 80% of the fish we eat in Ireland is imported, be it salmon, be it sea bass, be it cod. We export our best fish.
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Chapter 3: How can consumers be encouraged to try more diverse fish species?
And then people in Namibia cannot purchase those fish because we're putting pressure on the price. Same for us here, like, you know, that fish, I cannot afford to buy anymore because it's sent to the French market. We're just going to pay crazy money for a black sole or for a turbot. My son, who is, like, now 17, is working with us now, will not be taking over the business.
Train fishmonger is here today, like, no selling of fish. But I said to him, you look for something else. I don't want him to work as hard as I had to work to do the job right on the fish. Anyway, we'll not be there, really. This is not serious. Oh, this is not serious. Like, it's... We're at the end of the line, like... Ironically, Irish waters are full of bluefin tuna.
Ireland does not have a bluefin tuna quota. We never ask for a bluefin tuna quota. The UK has asked for it. They're not part of the EU, but they went to look for it. And now they have a 50-ton bluefin tuna quota. They now have burgeoning bluefin tuna fishery. And we're looking at them from Ireland and seeing those fish jumping in the water.
We catch them as bycatch, and that's the only way I can do tuna myself.
Chapter 4: What are the implications of fish quotas on local fishing communities?
All the tuna we eat in Ireland is coming from the Indian Ocean. In Tokyo, there are no Irish tuna. Japanese tuna boats are fishing off island. They're fishing 80 miles out. We can't get fish that swim in our own water.
Everybody in Europe thinks we're nuts. Everybody in Europe thinks that we're nuts. A little surprise, really. Magram, 15 euros a kilo versus Black Soul, 45 euros a kilo. And once you douse the whole thing in butter, you'd be hard-pressed to tell the difference between the two. Stefan van Griesbeck there, talking to Lorna Siggins.