Bloodless Battle On The Blackwater

The battle of Lismore Castle began on a green spring Saturday afternoon last month and ended at midnight when detectives of the Irish Special Branch, supported by 200 gardai, battered down the castle door to eject 31 members of the old Sinn Fein, who had occupied the building for seven hours. Loud cheers went up from spectators as the Sinn Feiners marched out through the front gate. Later, the unrepentant Sinn Feiners predictably sang We Shall Overcome as the police hauled down various provocative banners from the castle tower flagstaff.

But the occupation of the castle was only a preliminary bout. The main event was the public fish-in on the Blackwater River, the best beats of which, like Lismore Castle itself, belong to the Duke of Devonshire, who is undeniably an English aristocrat and who, in fact, was staying at his estate in England at the time of the trouble.

It wasn't the first Irish fish-in by any means, just the most publicized to date, and it went according to plan. On Sunday morning after Mass, a number of anglers who had no legal right to fish the duke's water went down to the river and started casting, watched by a large crowd on Lismore bridge. No salmon were caught—although last February at a similar fish-in on the River Boyne, Mr. Thomas Reynolds of Drogheda, County Louth hooked a 25-pound salmon, which he later entered in the competition for a national trophy.

Since 1968, every major river in Ireland has been fished in by anglers who are protesting against private ownership of fisheries in the Republic, and there is no doubt that the movement has wide popular support. The campaign is not backed by either of the two major political parties in Ireland, Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, however. Instead it is masterminded by Sinn Fein, a small extremist party which is generally held to be the political arm of the illegal IRA. For them, the private ownership of fishing rights, especially by foreigners, is the latest object of attack in a movement which hitherto chiefly concerned itself with foreign ownership of land. Ostensibly, the fish-ins are organized by a body called the National Waters Restoration League. The secretary and the chairman of the league are both prominent members of Sinn Fein and operate from the Dublin offices of The United Irishman, a monthly journal of far-out revolutionary views.

It was in The United Irishman offices, in fact, that I talked to Seamus O'Tuathail, the league chairman (he likes his name spelled that way, though in Ireland his name would more commonly be written O'Toole). The secretary, Sean Kenny, was unable to make the meeting, having that very afternoon been whisked away to Mountjoy Prison for attempting to occupy the British passport office in Dublin.

"I never held a fishing rod in my hand," Mr. O'Tuathail said cheerfully, "but I could see how unhappy the anglers of this country were. There have been odd protests for 20 years, but they've all been sporadic and easily put down. Now people like myself who are political people have seen that there's something useful to do, and we've joined the anglers. I can tell you," he chuckled, "that the company was a bit standoffish to begin with. Anglers are a funny lot and a few of them have been supping too long with the captains and the colonels who own the rivers. One or two of the fish-ins have been spontaneous, but most of them were organized by us." Us, of course, means Sinn Fein.

O'Tuathail explained tactics. A mild flirtation with the law is the first step. You go down to the river and you fish. You make a gesture. But you avoid a direct confrontation with the gardai if you can. Lately the river owners have been taking out court injunctions against fishers-in who get their faces recognized.

"We don't mind that," said O'Tuathail easily. "They expected us to put down our heads and charge—to go against the injunctions. This would be the normal Republican attitude: to hell with them! But, no, I told the boys, don't go near them. So what we do for now is force as many of them as possible into court to get injunctions. This means they're going to have to spend as much as $150 a go. They'll get their injunction all right, but we get the publicity."

I asked him about Lismore. "It was an escalation of the campaign," he said, "because the castle is a bit of a symbol." He slipped easily back into history. "The Duke of Devonshire's background—he's a descendant of Lord Mountjoy who in 1601 won the battle of Kinsale against the last of the Irish chieftains, Hugh O'Neill. Mountjoy got thousands of acres of land in Munster and river rights on the Blackwater, the richest salmon river in Munster, and that's saying something. We found out the English press was very sensitive about the Duke of Devonshire when we ran a little fish-in at Lismore a while back, so we thought that if we lowered his pennant and ran up the tricolor, there'd be more commotion, and so there was. The boys did no damage, mind you. It was the gardai," O'Tuathail continued censoriously, "that hacked through the furniture. Quite unnecessary."

O'Tuathail is fairly vague about what might happen if there was full public ownership of all Ireland's fishery resource. It was suggested that before long there wouldn't be any fish left if there were a free-for-all. At one point he said that he would not approve of all comers fishing without control but later said that all state license holders should be free to fish where and as they pleased. "It's a question for the people to decide," he said. "We're not going to be able to solve all these problems straightaway."