Times change. So do fashions. To Irish people in the miserable mid years of the 20th century fish was a food to be endured on Fridays, a symbol of abstinence and deprivation.

Today, fish is cool – something that’s enjoyable and good for us, a product of the rich waters around our shores and of our many lakes and rivers.

Irish people’s attitude to the sea and its riches is a complicated one, says Dr Jim Mac Laughlin, whose new book Troubled Waters is a fascinating account of Ireland’s coastal communities through the ages.

Galway features strongly in the book, unsurprising perhaps given the prominence of Galway City as an international trading centre for many centuries, and given the importance of fishing and seaweed to the economy of the county.

“It’s a new take on Irish history – it looks on Ireland as a maritime nation that has been failed by the political culture and the political elite,” says Jim of Troubled Waters.

It took four years to research and write this comprehensive book. He had to go all over the place to look for proof of what he was writing about, and to research the work of writers and artists who documented the lives of people living on Ireland’s coasts and offshore islands.

Local newspapers and histories were also helpful as Jim tried to raise the bar and give an overview of Irish coastal history, the first of its kind in Ireland.

Jim is a political geographer, which means he examines political events in relation to the places where they happen. Donegal born, he is now based in Cork and has long had an interest in people who have been marginalised in society.

Ireland’s coastal communities come under that category, mostly for historic reasons, he explains. The growth of nationalism in Ireland in the 19th century tended to prioritise the interests of people who worked the land rather than those who lived off the sea. The late 1800s saw the rise of rural fundamentalism and fundamental Catholicism – not good for coastal dwellers who were seen as hard to control, he adds.

Because of their way of life, fishing communities traditionally had their own social systems, such as existed in the Claddagh for generations.
“They lived in a separate part of town, in a different way with a different moral economy and living in a far wider world, with the sea and the openness of it,” explains Jim.

“One of the things I’ve always been interested in as a social scientist and writer is diversity. There was a great deal of colour and ingenuity in coastal Ireland.”

But the “diversity, ingenuity and joie de vivre” of these coastal people was recognised by very few landlocked residents, he says.
In fact, it was something that made the 19th century Catholic Church in Ireland very uncomfortable. “At the time, it was engaged in a civilising mission, taming alcoholic Ireland down and dressing sexual Ireland up.”

That didn’t tally with the macho world of fishermen.
Another development that didn’t help fishermen was Charles Darwin’s theory about ‘the survival of the fittest’, which was also gaining in popularity in the 19th century. This became a time when powerful people were revered and less powerful ones were sent to the margins of society. Ireland’s particular history and the Great Famine of the 1840s, may have contributed to this outlook, but it wasn’t something that was confined to Ireland, says Jim. It was a European phenomenon, where the poor were regarded as wards of state, people to be cared for but not given much say.
 

For more, read this week's Galway City Tribune.