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.
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 quantities that we rarely try ourselves.
“Razor clams would be a good example,” says Juan Blanes, chief executive of Glenmar Shellfish, a company that catches, imports, exports and distributes fish from five bases around the Irish coast. “We have a razor clam fleet in the east coast. Out of maybe five tonnes we can land in a week, or even seven tonnes depending on the week, we do about 200 kilos in the Irish market.” They are available in some specialist shops and high-end restaurants, but will pass many domestic consumers by.
In Irish waters, up to 3,000 tonnes a year of megrim are caught, often as by-catch. Most of this species go to Spain and Italy, and very few to the Irish market.
“It could be very easily incorporated into Irish menus because it’s so simple to prepare,” Blanes says. “Five minutes on a frying pan, or cook it in the oven with some olive oil and some garlic.”
Deeper cultural reasons are sometimes raised to explain the perceived aversion to fish and seafood, or at least the absence of the sort of exaltation that exists elsewhere around the Atlantic coast. Some of them do not appear to me to pass the sniff test. Is it cultural memory of the Famine and enforced foraging for seafood at a time of want? We still eat kale.
Or is it fishy Fridays at the behest of the Church? Among chefs and others I spoke to, this was a common explanation, but Ireland is not the only Catholic country in the world. The Italians, freed by Vatican II, still have a multi-course fish banquet on Christmas Eve; the Peruvians eat ceviche.
‘It’s a lack of education, people are unsure of what to do with it or how to cook it. It can often seem intimidating’
Millie Powell, chef, on why many Irish people don’t cook fish
More worthy of consideration, to me, are two questions that apply to almost every aspect of history in Ireland going back nearly a millennium: was it the English, and is it to do with cattle?
Regarding the English, it is as usual at least partly their fault. The dispossession of Catholics and the small plots they had to eke out enough calories to live on were not conducive to buying anything for cash, and the diet – potatoes, bread, dairy, occasional bacon – was more limited than continental peasant diets. Penal laws also explicitly hindered the Irish fleet.
But when did the not-that-into-fish ethos emerge? Have we been ambivalent about it for as long as we’ve had cattle?
There is an argument here: once the cattle came and it was established that grass grows well in Ireland and cattle turn grass into milk and other nutritious dairy products, it could be that we lost interest in other sources of protein, started chopping down forests and settled in for an infinite future of golden butter.
“I’d be a little bit sceptical about a direct switch,” UCD archaeologist Jessica Smyth says. It’s hard to say fishing and shellfish consumption waned in the Neolithic, when domesticated animals, pottery, wheat and barley arrived, partly because fish bones are harder to find 6,000 years later than cattle bones. And there is positive evidence that fishing continued in the Neolithic, from complex fish traps.
Ireland in deepening row with Norway over proposed fishing quotas in EU waters
But there is also, definitely, a dairy wave. It appears in roughly 4000BC, with milk residues already in the earliest pottery we have. And when you compare analysis of diets from human remains across Europe, “the Irish and British lipid signatures look very milky”, says Smyth.
Forthcoming research suggests that local cattle had longer birth seasons, possibly enabled by the mild climate. “So it could be that Ireland and maybe parts of Britain are sufficiently temperate and mild that you have a wider span of births, which would in turn give you more milk availability,” she says.
This milkiness lasts a long time. Fynes Morrison, an English administrator writing in 1617, noted: “When they are almost starved yet they will not kill a Cow, except it bee old, and yeeld no milke.”
We no longer live primarily on dairy, however, with avocados and soy sauce both common on Irish tables. So there must be more to it today.
One theme among chefs – who, at the high end, buy and cook only the best, freshest fish available – is that home cooks are by and large faced with portioned supermarket tray fish, which is to say fish of inferior quality. This can, they highlight, be smelly. Chemical compounds in the fish begin breaking down once it is out of the water.
A fresh fish on ice at a fishmonger’s shop presents less of a problem in this respect, but access to these is limited by geography in Ireland, where the supermarket reigns.
‘It’s amazing how many patients turn up their nose at the very concept of eating fish. They don’t like the smell of it, or whatever’
Ted Dinan, recently retired psychiatrist
“I think maybe the fact that fishmongers and fish vans have kind of died off has led to an inability to source good local seafood, so people resort to prepackaged stuff in a supermarket out of convenience,” says Millie Powell, an Irish chef at The Wren in Baltimore, Maryland, and formerly of Dublin’s Fish Shop.
The lack of a strong cultural connection to fish also means amateur cooks can lack the tools to make the most of fresh fish.
“It’s a lack of education, people are unsure of what to do with it or how to cook it. It can often seem intimidating,” Powell says.
It is not a unique problem to Ireland, but some other countries do pass the skill down more readily through generations. “You can always learn,” says fish supplier Blanes. “But if there is a generational heritage embedded into you, that always helps for sure.”
Some Irish menus are expanding to include more unfamiliar locally sourced dishes. Library Street in Dublin offers turbot head, while Achara serves Donegal squid pad phet, a red-curry stir fry dish.
The influence of such places is often felt on visitors’ views of Ireland as much as on our view of ourselves, but it can’t hurt if we are seen as a place of fresh and imaginative seafood cooking. Powell says Ireland “wasn’t seen as a country with fantastic cuisine and food culture” until recently. But that is changing, partly due to the fishy side of things.
As a keen eater in general, culinary motivations are more important to me than health-based ones – unless and until a doctor insists otherwise. But for many who eat fish, and many more who should, the health benefits are important.
They are many and varied: oily fish is explicitly recommended for heart health by the HSE (two to four portions a week).
Ted Dinan, a recently retired psychiatrist and professor of psychiatry at University College Cork, has faced dietary preference as a professional problem in the past. The polyunsaturated fatty acids present in oily fish have mental health benefits too, and he would recommend it alongside other treatments.
“It’s amazing how many patients turn up their nose at the very concept of eating fish. They don’t like the smell of it, or whatever.”
Of course, mackerel alone won’t solve every problem, with a varied diet full of fresh and nutritious foods being necessary.
“But the difference, I suppose, between that and fruit and veg is that people will at least eat some fruit and veg usually,” says Dinan, “whereas people will simply not eat fish.”