For Gerard McCourt, there is a lot riding on this year’s eel catch. He should be looking forward to casting his first lines of 2024. However, the 42-year-old McCourt cuts a troubled figure as golden sunshine intermittently punctures the brooding, overcast skyline behind him.
“This year will tell a tale,” he says, with a mix of desperation and agitation in his voice. He talks like a man running on fumes. Dressed in a diesel-flecked grey hoodie, and standing at a jetty along the northern shore of a vast lough (“lake” in Gaelic or Gaeilge, the Irish language), he says that this season will be “make or break” for him and dozens of other fishermen.
Six generations of McCourt’s family have fished for eels here in Lough Neagh, one of the largest freshwater lakes in northwestern Europe. The 400sq km (154sq-mile) lough has been both a muse for Irish artists, poets, and storytellers and a source of deep pride for fishermen who have worked these waters for centuries.
McCourt’s licence was handed down to him by his father – just like the 90 or so other fishermen at Lough Neagh. His boat, which he uses to work the waters at the lough’s south-western end, is also passed down: “Wee Henry” was built by and named after his father. Although not particularly “wee” at around 8 metres (27 feet) long, the burnished black fibreglass vessel is a far cry from the timber rowing boats that lough fishermen used in decades gone by – when eels and other catch were more plentiful.
This is no longer the case. Dwindling numbers of eels compounded by an algal bloom that swept the water body last summer and autumn meant fishermen like McCourt “effectively had to write off” an entire season, he says.
But this drop in eel numbers and dramatic water quality deterioration did not come out of nowhere.
In 1983, Lough Neagh’s annual recruitment of juvenile eels (elvers) suddenly plummeted from 8 million to 726,000 – less than 10 percent of what it had been a year beforehand.
And the condition of Northern Ireland’s waterways – many of which feed into the lough system – has been declining for years. In 2021, none of the region’s rivers, lakes, transitional or coastal bodies could be classified as being in “good” health under European water quality legislation.
Even before last year’s algal growths, an annual fishing industry report published in April 2023 revealed that the number of elvers “naturally recruited” – and not flown in from the Severn Estuary in England, which has increasingly been the case in recent years – to the lough system was down by approximately half of the previous year’s figure.
This sharp decline in the eel population has also been happening across the rest of Europe. Although the main drivers remain a mystery, many point to climate change.
Adam Mellor, principal scientific officer for the Agri-Food and Biosciences Institute in Northern Ireland (AFBINI), tells Al Jazeera that many complex factors and variables have made it very difficult to pinpoint what is driving the species loss.
He says that despite a “really big body of knowledge” from the fishery itself and the scientists who are studying it, massive gaps in external knowledge are extremely hard to fill. “There’s still a lot of assumption in there,” he adds.
Also, the eels’ breeding cycles, which involve lunar phases and migration to the Sargasso Sea in the Atlantic Ocean, are still not fully understood by scientists, despite recent discoveries.
McCourt speaks of “ecological grief” afflicting fishermen who have for years sensed the major decline in fish and wildlife numbers, which has been validated by recent studies. Growing concerns over continued loss of income and the future viability of commercial fishing at Lough Neagh are only making matters worse, he says.
In 2023, McCourt says, he managed just three weeks in the water during a season that runs from early May to “around Halloween” or the end of October. “I’d definitely have to give up if there isn’t a good catch this May,” he says. “Financially, we couldn’t take another battering like the one we took last year.”
A further collapse in the eel numbers at Lough Neagh could effectively signal the end of commercial fishing at the water body, McCourt adds, given the premium they are sold at when compared with other available fish.