Having read the Dennis Moss article in this months T&S, I am left with a very depressing picture of trout fishing in Ireland. Are things as bad as he portrays? Are the loughs over-fished? What are Irish anglers doing about it?

If things really are bad, surely some kind of drastic action is needed i.e. resting loughs for a season; stopping the catch and kill competitions; establishing hatcheries etc. etc.

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But Jesus beheld them and said unto them, "With men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible."

Matthew 19:26

Having met dennis and fished with him im sure his views on loughs in ireland are his own personal views, certainly a number of loughs have for a variety of factors not fished as well as they have in the past,
on the other hand loughs like sheelin owel lene have excelled mostly because of the hard working fishing clubs and the catch and release motto held by a vast amount of anglers over here,
im sure dennis will give his view on the 8 lb plus fish he caught on a mayfly on sheelin last season, a fine fish that was one of many up to 12lb caught during the excellent season

Unfortunately Gander until Ireland's environmental awareness and social conscience towards valuing it's natural assets are dragged into the modern era - degradation of wild resources in the present state will indeed continue...

Exploit and abuse what we have today in the present and f*ck the natural wealth we leave to our children, sums attitudes up best here in the West of Ireland - attitudes of anglers around my parts are mixed at best from enlightened to cringe worthy.

glad you said that joey and not me as i would be attacked from all quarters, but i agree 100%, and unless your here all the time and see it with your own eyes you cannot imagine the way some or most fisheries are run, managed and protrayed in the angling publications,
i have seen some wonderful waters with vast shoals of fish that the fishery board discounts as vermin netted and piled high on the islands and shorelines of these loughs,
water management at its best, wastage and mis use of our natural resources in a time when our economy is screaming out for something to ignite it back into action,
sadly the over emphasis on game angling and the mis management of our loughs will mean we will never achieve or meet the enormous potential , and wealth of fishing on these islands

Here here, well said!

I also read Dennis' article and found it saddening.
I've never fished in Ireland and was planning a trip this year but have been somewhat put off.
What i don't understand is why anglers would want to kill so many trout,them being in MHO very average eating,aside from making dents in stocks.
I suspect most of the killed fish probably go the same way,in the bin or in the cat.
I'm certainly not against killing fish,but do people need to go home with a bag of fish every time they go out.
On the rivers I fish,If most anglers kept all fish of takeable size it would probably take about 4 weeks to fish the whole lot out.
I can only assume Irish anglers operate in much the same way as the French and Spanish (of whom I have knowledge),and don't consider fishing worthwhile unless they can take a load of fish home.
Maybe having all these fisheries in Ireland free doesn't help much either.
Look at the marine stocks in the general 'free for all'that that is.

I thought Dennis wrote an article recently for T+S describing the whoppers he caught on Lough Ree etc?

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Irish by birth, Munster by the grace of God.

He did,it was a little booklet describing wonderful fishing on many of the loughs,and was what whetted my appetite for going!

Well seems like ink sells no matter what way it writes, i certainly think the wild loughs of ireland are full of fantastic fishing and anyone who has sampled it at its best will be hooked for life, its not many loughs or lakes world wide where you can witness wild brown trout well into double figures feeding on mayflies as they fall to the water, such was the size of these fish that trying to oar after them was a impossibility due to their high cruising speed as they dined on the spent knats,
yeoman if you decide to come over and i hope you do, come fish lough sheelin around the end of may, and you will see what ive just described to you,

These fuc*ers should be held accountable for there actions on these lovely big wild fish ....

It's back to the old school mentality kill, kill and kill some more it's shocking...

I used to fish up the "north of Scotland"a fair bit for wild browns and I had to stop it... It really got to me and made me bitter because of the way some of these locals "had" to slaughter big wild fish in the name of a comp or just to prove they had caught one...do they not know there is not someone come'n round the corner in a big boat to stock it...

Now I fish for pike more often than not and do my own thing in take'n care of the fish I catch and my future fishing and have never looked back.

Wilke

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" TRUE CHAMPION'S DO NOT GET JUDGED ON HOW THEY FALL......... BUT HOW THEY RISE".