Hate the Sin, not the Sinner!
So another post has gone viral, over 38,000 interactions in the last few weeks! Maybe not viral in the sense of pop super stardom but in the terms of fishing in Ireland, that is viral! So a few points, firstly, why do people send me these pictures? That is a good question but can be answered very easily, I have nothing to lose! The person that sent me this picture is very well known in the angling world but has a reputation and a livelihood to protect. Personally I don't believe in reputations but that's just me. Maybe cause I have destroyed my own reputation, once too many times! 😅 Some people care about what people think of them, I couldn't care less. We all make mistakes, no matter how great and perfect you think you are. In actual fact I prefer hostile and challenging environments, I'm used to that. So here we have a picture of over fifty illegally poached Atlantic salmon. We have a few lads, rejoicing in the fact that they just netted and killed wild Salmon from an Irish river. Not a good thing. Now you need to understand that we have a state body called the IFI who have actually gone on record, numerous times, saying that illegal netting of Salmon is almost extinct. Its a thing of the past. Then they sometimes talk about how dangerous the job is and recently I have seen a newspaper article where the reporter was very obviously paid to big up the IFI. I have people on my page saying that poaching is over and done with. All people want to do nowadays is blame distant problems that we cant do anything about. Nobody is saying that climate change isn't a problem, of course it is, nobody is saying that European super trawlers are not a problem, of course they are, but poaching in our rivers is a problem that we the taxpayers pay well over 20 million euro a year to protect.
The reality is in the last few weeks rivers up and down the country are being poached. Poachers are sending whats app images to different people and then they are getting sent to me. Down through the years I have had loads of images and videos sent of lads netting Salmon. I share some, others I just delete. I used to pass them on to IFI but it never went anywhere. I could go into the phone calls into the freephone helpline, I could go into conversations with fishery officers that I have had but whats the point. They do not want the hassle. They see me as crazy and off the wall. Maybe they are right but guess what, I actually care. That is why people send me the images, they know that, I will share them. I have the audience and I cant be bought either through money or gain, in any way at all. Like for example, political people message me sometimes, but they never want to be associated with me. I got sent pictures of salmon netted in the Laune but I refused to share them because I felt the person who had the pictures should have shared them. That was his job.
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| Glenteenassig Valley, Dingle Peninsula, August 2021 |
I was out running at the weekend and by chance I met a man who writes for the examiner. We got talking and I found him very interesting. We talked about a number of things but mostly we spoke about the environment and nature. He told me about his own experience with various issues in the Untied Kingdom. I would have never realised that state bodies like the IFI would have a budget for PR. With a little research, I found out that not only do the IFI have a budget for PR but they also contract out work within the public relations world. That article in the times recently was a product of just that. From doing that bit of research then I started looking into the accounts of the IFI. The salaries of the top lads, the salaries of all the employees, the contract work, the donations, the costs etc etc. Its a 25 million euro operation. They only take in over 3 million the rest is government funded. So that is another hobby, at night after a long day going through all the accounts freely available on the fisheries Ireland site. With regards the petition and the netting in cromane, I had to take a step back because I recently changed jobs and I was very sick at the start of July and it took my a few weeks to get over that. With the hot weather I practically lived on the beach but the fight goes on, and the petition is going strong well over a thousand signatures at the moment. Tight lines! 🙏