Fishing in Sligo

Diane,

In the 1901 census, 211 people in the county gave their profession as “fisherman.”

This link contains a description of Co Sligo in the 1830s. There is a paragraph on fishing, which mentions that a lot of fish were caught locally and that the oysters were of the highest quality, often being sent up to Dublin. It sounds as though the fishing boats were a bit primitive and that the fishing wasn’t as well organized as it might have been.

https://irelandxo.com/ireland-xo/history-and-genealogy/timeline/county-sligo-1830s

So the simple answer to your question is that there were fish available in Co. Sligo. However they were not much use to the average labourer who was too poor to buy them. So they didn’t routinely feature in most people’s diet. The fishermen had families to support so they sold their fish to buyers who then transported them to Dublin and elsewhere. What percentage were exported, I have no idea but the overall situation was similar to farming. Though the potato crop was badly hit by blight, other crops were unaffected and farmers whose land was of good enough quality to grow oats, barley etc, were OK during the famine years. They continued to sell their crops at market to the highest bidder, and so supported their families. So there was food in Ireland, but the vast majority of the population ie labourers with only a tiny plot of land couldn’t afford to buy it. There were far more people than there was work for, so they couldn’t earn the money to buy food. (Population of Ireland went from 3 million in 1741 to 8 million in 1841. It’s only 6 million today). You get more potatoes to the acre than any other crop. They are also low maintenance and – blight apart – normally grow particularly well in Irish soil. Consequently in a country with no spare land, if you have a large family to feed, and only a couple of perches of land, you plant the whole plot with potatoes.  Which works fine, until they are blighted 3 years in a row. 

The Government should have intervened much more than they ever did and bought up the surplus food and re-distributed it as famine relief.  But that’s another story.

I heard somewhere that now it's so hard to fish here because of polluted water