The Irish government has paid 20 fishermen more than €2.6m to hang up their nets in a bid to avoid the extinction of wild salmon in Irish rivers, the British news site Timesonline reported
These commercial fishermen, who averaged pay-outs of €132,000 each, were the highest earners among 1,044 applicants sharing almost €25m over the past two years, as part of a move to revive salmon rivers.
In 26 rivers around the country’s coastline, and more in Northern Ireland, wild salmon have been caught for decades in drift nets and in bag-shaped draft nets, trailed from small boats working the estuaries further upstream.
In 2005, a report by the standing scientific committee of the National Salmon Commission found that only a few rivers were keeping to the conservation limits that it had set to protect salmon stocks. The report recommended that commercial salmon fishing be ended in most of the river catchments and severely restricted in the remaining areas.
A fund was set up aimed at the now redundant crews and processing workers employed in the drift-netting and draft-netting trade. Among the 1,044 applicants mentioned above, 106 drift-net and draft-net fisherman were given between €50,000 and €100,000 each, sharing €6.1m, while about 500 smaller operators shared €2.9m at the lower end of the net-decommissioning programme. A further €2.3m will be shared between the 1,044 this year and in 2010, bringing the total payments under the scheme to €27m, €2m more than budgeted for in 2007.