The furthest point in Ireland from the sea is Moyvore, Co Westmeath, about 100km (or an hour and a half in the car) in either direction.
The State has an Exclusive Economic Zone of 450,000km², 10 times its territorial extent, thanks to being on an island with much sea frontage. You would think, therefore, that a love of seafood and a developed cuisine would have emerged naturally over time. But this appears not to be the case.
Why don’t we eat more fish? Why don’t we do it with passion, revelling in the variety available to us and the fact that literally everyone lives closer to the sea than those in Paris, where so many platters of fruits de mers are consumed with relish? Why are so many people so reluctant?
Statistics show that we are actually relatively good fish eaters by European standards, consuming 22kg per capita per year – half of Portugal’s consumption, but more than in the UK or Greece. On the EU-wide Eurobarometer survey, we are way above average for self-reported eating of fish every week.
But in practice, it seems that certain pescatarians, and in particular the health-conscious, are doing much of the heavy lifting. According to the most recent National Adult Nutrition Survey, conducted in 2021 and 2022, 90 per cent of adults aged between 19 and 64 ate meat, compared with 34 per cent for fish. Women are significantly more likely to eat fish than men, who nonetheless rocket from 27 per cent to 43 per cent in the over-65 category, perhaps at the instigation of their GPs.
[ Irish fishermen need basic income payment to ‘stop collapse’ of the sector, Oireachtas committee told Opens in new window ]
I am not well versed in the inspection of fish, but as an enthusiastic holiday fish eater, I am sometimes called upon to do so. Earlier this year, a man in formal dress held a sea bream out towards me on a terrace near the sea in northwestern Italy. I treat such occasions in the same way I do wine sampling: if it doesn’t seem obviously gone off, I’ll just say “okay”. The reason I am happy to do this is because I assume they wouldn’t carry a whole intact fish through a restaurant full of people towards me if it was somehow inedible.
This is faith in the culture. Many of the people in Ireland who eat fish do so primarily from the supermarket, buying portioned salmon, frozen whitefish or pre-peeled prawns, always in the safety of packaging. They have never brought home a bagged whole fish from an icy counter to gut and prepare at home, so they would never have learned the skill of identifying a particularly fresh fish. Neither have I, but I believe in the Italians.
The sea bream I ate in Liguria seemed as though it came from the sea nearby, but I found out a few days afterwards that it was likely farmed some distance to the south and shipped in by truck. Checking is now a habit: a few years ago, after a pleasant meal in Dublin, I was prompted by my positive mood to look up some facts about the kinds of fish on the menu, including the type I had eaten.
Was that tuna Irish? No, probably not. Nor is halibut fished commercially here, nor in fact sea bass, which historically was landed but went through stock collapse in our waters and is now under a ban. And if it does not say “wild Irish salmon” on the salmon, it is farmed salmon. If it does not say “Irish salmon” at all, it is probably Norwegian or Scottish.
As consumers, we are not especially hot on provenance. When it comes to seafood, in many cases, we export things in large qu…