The winter population is about 1,200. The local fishing fleet stands at about 45 boats. But up to 15 boats will be decommissioned by their owners this year and the worries in the community have become acute.
“I suppose it was death by a thousand cuts,” Jason Sheehan says from his upstairs office on the harbour. Outside, it’s squally, leaden-skied, and the afternoon holds a children-still-at-school feel. He wears a grey hoodie and a small cut on his nose – a souvenir from a recent fishing trip in the Hebrides. He is one of the younger fishermen in the community. He has five fishing vessels and this marine supply business; the store is big and immaculately kept. It’s an impressive business.
Jason’s father began fishing as a teenager, when the community didn’t have the boats or technology; it was a small-scale way of life. The advent of the Castletownbere Fishermen’s Co-Operative Society , in 1968, began to change things. When Jason was a boy of around 10, fishing in Castletownbere was probably in its golden period. The routine was weekly: all the boats would go out fishing on a Sunday night and they’d return on Friday.
John Nolan is an accidental fish man. He came here more than 40 years ago, swapping ceramics production to come and manage the co-op. Raising a family here was, he says, a blessing. He’s soft-spoken, quick-moving and hospitable and he nibbles a Kit Kat for lunch as he talks through the no-man’s waters of European Union fishing quotas and rights, which he argues have bamboozled Irish fishing in the 50 years since the country joined the EU. And “Brexit broke our will”, he says.
John Nolan, Managing Director of Castletownbere Fishermen’s Co-op, on Dinish Island, Castletownbere. Photograph: Valerie O'Sullivan “We have to pay back the tie-up money. There’s capital gains tax, which must be paid. And then the bank. You probably have to pay to break up the boat. You have to sit down and work that out. The cost of getting the boat to where you are going. You have redundancy then.”
There’s a range of quality, reasonably priced seafood restaurants but increasingly, opening days are seasonal. Sea fishing is a tough job and, as the location of the Coast Guard serves to remind, a dangerous one, too. Castletownbere has had its share of tragedies. Adrienne MacCarthy volunteered on the coastal rescue for 20 years. When the St Gervaise sank, suddenly and in the darkness in November 2000, she found herself searching for the body of the husband of one of her closest friends.
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