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In the small town of Dingle Ireland, there is a local family-run business called the Fish Box. Locals and tourists alike line up down the street to get a taste of their fish. Only five years old, this restaurant is a huge success, but what’s the catch?

Today we dive into the issues in the fishing industry in Dingle and Ireland as a whole. We take a closer look at the Fish Box and how they manage to stay afloat despite rising prices, increasingly expensive fuel, biased restrictions, and sustainability struggles. With the help of special guest, Micheal Flannary, we get an inside look into what it’s like to be an Irish fisherman today.

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CHRISSY: I just want to know, do you know where your fish comes from?

FISH BOX CUSTOMER: the Atlantic Ocean

CHRISSY: That’s a customer at the Fish Box, a family-owned restaurant in Dingle, Ireland where we: Chrissy, Nolan, and Eva are spending five weeks exploring the local culture and history of this small seaside town. Did I mention there is always a line out the door of this tiny venue? All seems rosy, right? However, recent changes in the fishing industry have led to increased prices of our favorite fishy dishes and changes in where our fish comes from, how it’s prepared, and who is preparing them. You might stop to think twice about spending a few extra for your fish, but have you thought about why you need to?  

Boat Noise                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    

Something is happening behind the scenes, something… fishy. I’m Chrissy, I’m Nolan, and I’m Eva, and we are here to fish out the answers to this fishery mystery with the help of a local Dingle business focused on sustainability and quality fish.

MICHEAL: My name is Micheal Flannery. I’m the owner of the Fish Box. I own it with my father and my brother.

EVA: Micheal founded Fish Box in 2018. It’s a small restaurant. Locals and tourists are often seen lined up down the street outside the bright blue building, waiting to get a taste of the award-winning fish. When you go to the fish box you can expect to get the freshest fish available because they catch it themselves.

MICHEAL: The fish box started out quite small to be honest, and just kind of evolved.

NOLAN: The restaurant evolved from a wholesale outlet market to an actual restaurant in response to changes in the Atlantic fishery. Because of a multitude of problems, the profitability in solely fishing was waning, leaving Micheal to figure out how to keep the family business afloat.

MICHEAL: Like, you know, a big thing that, like my grandfather, my father always says, it’s called fishing, not catching. It means that no day is ever the same. It’s always different. And that’s important to remember that just cause you’ve one good day doesn’t mean the next day’s gonna be good.

NOLAN: Micheal’s dad has been a commercial fisherman for the last 50 years and the family’s fishing history is much older, going back 100 years. But as the 21st century began, things began looking grim. 

MICHEAL: We were finding it very hard to find a market for our fish, and we just felt that the kind of quality of the produce that we were bringing in wasn’t getting the value that it should have been getting. 

NOLAN: And so, Micheal opened the Fish Box, a family-run restaurant that catches, prepares, and serves its own fish. But while they were no longer worried about selling their fish to processors, they ran into new problems. 

MICHEAL: the problem is in Ireland, we just don’t have enough quota.

EVA: In Ireland, the fishermen only have a certain amount of fish they can catch each month. In order to sustain their businesses, they have to catch all their fish in 30 days, but its not that easy. 

MICHEAL: if you get 20 days bad weather, you only got 10 days to catch a fish and makes it very dangerous.

EVA: Not only dangerous, but catch quotas limit the number of fish boats are allowed to catch. 

MICHEAL: Yeah, so in Ireland we get a pretty raw deal with the fishing industry. I think we have a really large percentage of the waters and probably have the richest waters in Europe, but we have the minimum quotas here, which makes it really, really, really hard for the fishermen. 

EVA: But these quotas aren’t the same for other European countries that fish in Ireland, leading to a situation that can only be seen as unfair to the local fishermen. 

MICHEAL: You know, there’s plenty fish. There’s so much fish. There’s Spanish boats, there’s French boats, there’s Belgian boats, there’s every kind of boats fishing and harvesting. So like maybe five, six times more than what we can take outta the sea, which I just think is wrong, like, and other than being a fish fishing nation with built on fishing and farming, I think that it should be more self reliant on what it has.

EVA: There are other problems faced by Irish fishermen aswell. [Mee – hall] tells us there is an reduction in the Irish fleet, and the boats they do have are getting old. On top of that, there is a rising cost in the fuel needed for the boats. 

MICHEAL: They just brought on a decommissioning scheme and there’s been around 40 boats taken out of it, but all from the same sector are whitefish. All from whitefish, so that means there’s 40. That’s both supplying the restaurants this year. Of Ireland has put the restaurants in a really sticky predicament because we’ve already gone up on oil, gas and electricity, but now our fish is going up.

EVA: With rising costs of fuel and labor, the restaurant industry as a whole is dealing with higher prices that carry over to their consumers. So, many people are now simply choosing to cook for themselves rather than going out taking a chunk out of the livelihoods for these local businesses.

NOLAN: Micheal says that the government isn’t providing enough support to sustain the local trade of fishing. He proposes that the Irish government must work with the EU to increase the funding towards fishing in Ireland and help fishermen get back into full swing by increasing quotas. The first step would be by repairing or replacing old boats and giving local fishermen more power over local waters. 

Ocean Waves

MICHEAL: There’s an area that we fish on the parking point Bank West, about 180 miles west of Dingle.

That’s our main fishing area. We can only fish there five months of the year. What do we do for the other seven? when we are not fishing there, there’s English boats fishing there, there’s Spanish boats fishing there.

Why are they allowed to fish there? And we are not. It’s in our waters. It’s wrong. It’s totally wrong. So instead of us being 180 miles, Away from home and landing at home all the time. We’re 400 miles away landing into different ports. And these, these are men they’re coming home. They don’t see their kids.

CHRISSY: Today, its not just the weather fishermen are worried about, but also the law. 

NOLAN: A few months ago, the fishermen with the restaurant had a run in with the law. They had been in waters designated for prawn fishing where the cutoff day was November first. While there, they made the decision that after prawn season was over they would swap to bigger nets to catch white fish. They called the proper authorities who granted them permission, as long as their yield of prawns was less than five percent. While fishing they were flagged down, searched and detained by the navy, despite their catch yielding only 3 percent. They were held for several days without a charge until the final day where they came up with a charge that Micheal says most people consider to be made up. With this charge their boat is now frequently stopped by authorities, impeding their ability to catch fish.

MICHEAL: I just think that they criminalize it a lot. 

So just for an example now, I think there’s nine fishery patrol officers in Dingle and there is uh, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 ports. Yeah, which is just crazy. It’s just really hard to make an ends meet at the moment with it. Between weather and just everything, it’s tough. It’s a tough, tough gig. This isn’t, 50 years ago, all of the men now are qualified people. They all have high skippers tickets, they all have education. They’re intelligent men. They should know what’s going on.

I think at the moment the fishing is actually on the fence. And I think it’s nearly at the point of no return, where it’s gonna be too far for them to come back. And if they lose it, they’re in serious trouble because they’ll never get it back.

I don’t know what’s going to happen. It’ll be interesting to see does our quota increase, because if it doesn’t, there’s something very wrong and it’ll be there for the world to see. So I hope they do something. 

CHRISSY: Still, tourists and locals alike line up for a chance to taste the Fishbox’s fish, ranking the restaurant high on the travel guide’s best places to eat. The Flannarys plan on expanding the number of seats to 100, so although things seem dire, they are still planning for a future that includes fresh, locally caught fish, from sea to plate in a few, difficult steps. 

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