Kintyre and the Islands
Islay takes on major fish farming company - and wins! By Naill Coulthart
On the 6th of June 2011 the Scottish Salmon Company(SSC) gave a short presentation to the Islay Community Council. The presentation went largely unnoticed as there happened to be another presentation being given that evening on the subject of Doctors Surgeries that attracted a large audience . This short presentation to a small and unprepared audience was the sum total of the SSC's dialogue with the local community and constituted a tick in the box against consultation with what is one of the main Statutory Consultees, that is the local Islay Community Council.(ICC)
Following publication on the ICC's website of the SCC's proposal to site two enormous fish farms (a total of 16 cages covering 236,800m2) in one of the most scenic and naturally diverse and unspoilt areas of Islay's coastline , the local community were in uproar. Islay is currently as far from aquaculture as it is possible to get on the west coast seaboard.
Representations were made to the ICC for support in fighting the proposal. The Community Council as representative of the views of the whole island had to ,in the initial stages,take a wholly neutral stance and gather as much information as possible as to the collective opinion of the community. This strategy, which was extremely frustrating to those of us on the outside , ultimately paid off as we could demonstrate we spoke for the whole island.
We realised early on in the fight that there was a considerable duplication of work going on and for this reason we decided that if we were to have any chance of success against what is a huge multi-national company ,we had to have a co-ordinated response from a broad base of the local community. For this reason we set up a campaign group called IASG (the gaelic for fish) with the initial purpose of canvassing the local community council to support our fight and demonstrate the will of the community was against the proposal. We did this by starting online petitions and gathering local signatures, leafleting and publishing material designed to inform locals as to the dangers of aqua-culture on our website www.islay-iasg.co.uk . To date we have 1814 signatures on the online petition and around a thousand on the paper petition. (the population on the island is around 3500). To this end we were ultimately successful as the community council agreed to support our fight and wrote a strongly worded letter to SSC saying that the island did not want them.
Claggain Bay and MacArthurs Head are both environmentally rich hosting populations of dolphins, whales, otters, a vast array of sea birds and probably most importantly , sits adjacent to a huge and important colony of common seals. These seals would naturally see the fish cages as a source of food and be attracted to the nets. The Aqua-culture industry purports to utilise deterant systems such as net tensioning and bio-accoustic deterents (which in themselves are alleged to affect the natural behaviour of whales and dolphins) but none of these are 100% foolproof. The aqua-culture industry's plan B has always been the shooting of seals and it is in this area that the industry as a whole has a woeful track record with injured seals being washed up on beaches the length of the coast line.
The effect on wild fish stocks of Salmon and Sea Trout has been much reported with genetically inferior salmon interbreeding with indigenous stocks with a resultant dilution of the wild fish resulting in a deterioration in the viability of the population as a whole. Another but no less serious problem facing wild fish is the presence of sea lice which thrive in the overcrowded cages living on their captive hosts. On their migratory routes from open sea to river the wild fish encounter these sea lice with often fatal consequences which has led to the almost total collapse of the west coast sea trout population in particular. Very many jobs have been lost on the western seaboard as a result of lost sporting revenue and many livlihoods on Islay still rely on fishing income.
On the third of August in the face of overwhelming public opposition the Scottish Salmon Company withdrew its interest in the two sites on the south coast of Islay but as a parting shot said that it will be looking at alternative sites around the island. We were lucky on Islay to have caught the proposal in its very early stages and to have headed it off before it could go through the planning stage. Each time one of these huge companies, either successful or otherwise submits a proposal for one of these environmentally damaging sites they learn valuable lessons for future proposals . Contrast this to the often economically and socially vulnerable peripheral communities in which this industry operates, which have to enter any fight learning as they go, it is, certainly in the initial stages an unequal fight.
Since Norway was ostracized by China after its award of a Nobel peace prize to a Chinese human rights activist, Scotland has become a major player in the supply of salmon to the worlds fastest growing economy after signing a huge trade agreement. What our communities are fighting is the Scottish Governmental policy which is condoning the polluting and destroying of our most beautiful and naturally rich habitats and the species it supports for short term gain . This is why increasing numbers of small communities are finding it so very difficult to see off the imposition of this industry on their doorstep.