An untapped potential laps our shores

Senator David Norris has been a member of the Trinity College Dublin University Panel in Seanad Éireann since 1987 and is a founding member of the Joint Committee on Foreign Affairs. He was Senior Lecturer in the Department of English in Trinity College Dublin from 1968 to 1996.  He is one of Ireland’s leading Joyce scholars; was the Founding Chairman of the James Joyce Centre; the North Great George’s Street Preservation Society and Friends of the Library (longest serving Chairman) TCD. His main areas of concern are national and international human and civil rights, equality issues for gay and lesbian people and conservation of Dublin architectural history. He studied the piano with the late Lily Huban at the Reade Pianoforte School in Harcourt Street.

Senator David Norris

One of the powerful influences on my life was my aunt who being a midlands woman distrusted and was fearful of the sea. She was my mother’s older sister and my mother and she reared me after the death of my father when I was six. He was an English man, John Norris, lover of the sea, a sailor and a holder of Lloyd’s Medal (The Marine VC) from the First World War.

Like all his forbears before him he felt that strong pull of the ocean tide. The name Norris in fact just means ‘Norseman’ or ‘Viking’ so it is just as well that the genetic balance was rescued by this infusion of Norse-English blood which gave me my own love of the sea.

I sometimes think we in Ireland don’t often realise we are an island, and should indeed in the words of Dominic Behan’s ironic song: Thank God We’re Surrounded be Water. Of course James Joyce in his novel Ulysses and in Finnegan’s Wake gives us a wonderfully musical evocation of the sea and its moods and movement but it is only a lingering glance.

Maritime miscellany
I always listen to Seascapes on RTE Radio in the late evening. It brings you in contact with the fishing community; stories of bravery of lifeboat men; the struggles of the fishing industry and also the record of those who minister to them spiritually – things like the Missions to Seamen especially when as a result of legal disputes over crews left stranded on the Dublin quays in rust buckets of dubious ownership.

Seascapes also a few months ago did an excellent piece on a seafood festival up in Donegal where a group of restaurants combined in order to maximise gourmet tourism. We could do with more of this.

I honestly don’t think we make enough of our domestic produce. This is partly a relic of the penitential days of ‘fish on Friday’ but when you think of the salmon, prawns, crab, mussels and scallops etc which can provide such a rich harvest and make delicious food, I think there is a great deal of untapped potential still there.

There are not many places where you get a good simple crab salad or crab mayonnaise. Often when prawns are served in a restaurant they turn out to be these jet lagged limp water-logged creatures from somewhere in Asia instead of our own beautiful fluffy Irish pink and white prawns.

I use the word Irish instead of Dublin because I want to include the Atlantic prawn as well as the Dublin Bay prawn which is a rare enough item these days. I was very pleased to learn about an initiative in Co Cork where seafood producers were given training and incentives in the management and packaging of fresh seafood produce.

These matters are discussed in the Senate but they rarely attract much attention. I am sorry for this because I do remember in my own very early days in Seanad Éireann being spellbound when Senator Tom Fitzgerald from Dingle spoke passionately on one of the Fisheries Bill. When I congratulated him subsequently he told me he was indeed himself a trawler skipper. I think it is very important that we hear directly from the voice of the fishing industry in ways like this.

Marine resources

Indeed I am certain one of the things that will ultimately lift this country back into the position as one of the leading most successful economies in Europe, will be a proper recognition of, and respect for, the wealth of resources with which we as an island have been fortunately presented.

Of course in terms of fishing this must mean sustainable fishing. There are three very large vessels with the word Celtic and Atlantic in their title: Atlantic Dawn, Celtic Voyager and the Celtic Explorer. The Atlantic Dawn is basically a factory ship, a super trawler, designed as a pride of a new entrepreneurial aspect of Irish fishing. Nevertheless it was held to damage fish stocks – partly because of its enormous capacity – and was banished from European waters and sent off fishing to the seas off Senegal in Africa.

We have also of course been on the receiving end principally from some of our European neighbours whose marauding expeditions reached even as far as the Canadian cod banks. I think the fact that Irish trawlers are forced to comply with the discard policy under which perfectly good food is dumped at sea while our European fellow fishermen can apparently land un-weighed catches at Irish ports needs to be reassessed.

The other two ships with the word Celtic in them are the two magnificent vessels associated with the Marine Institute in Galway. The Celtic Voyager is a multi-purpose research vessel for coastal research and its larger sister, Celtic Explorer which has a brief in the areas of fishery, acoustics, oceanography and hydrographic research. The work they have been doing in providing mapping information, fish population surveys and scientific examination of the food and mineral resources of this nation is quite remarkable.

On this point reverting again to the political sphere, I believe it is very important that the Government reinstates the Keating principles under which it was policy that a reasonable percentage of the yield of natural resources including from the ocean should be available to the Irish people as their birth right.

The designated Irish continental shelf represents one of the largest marine exclusive economic zones of the European Zone and the fact that we have an institute conducting flag ship research – not just in fishing but in the discovery of new drugs and advanced bio materials from marine organisms for sustainable farming of cod for the development of advanced genetic tools for monitoring and predicting fish population – is a tribute to all those involved.

The impact of the ocean upon our country is indeed enormous. We all learnt at school about the importance of the Gulf Stream and we are now on the threshold of developing energy resources from wave power with a number of patents pending in this area.

I give thanks for the fact we are surrounded by sea and water – not because it separates us from our neighbouring island – but because it provides us with such a wonderful resource of pleasure, profit and protein.