Ireland is, as everybody knows, the Emerald Isle. As a poor country, but with fantastic long coastlines on a rich sea, why did it not utilize those natural resources as Italy and Japan did (and do)?
God knows how it could have helped them through the Famine, at least.
What evidence do you have that they didn’t? They ate a lot of fish, shellfish, and even kelp. The Famine had as much to do with the system of land ownership as with the potato blight.
Some basic googling would have turned up this page.
To take up fishing on a commercial scale requires capital - which was beyond most peasants.
Irish people do eat fish - every coastal town and village has (or had) a fishing harbour and a fleet of fishing vessels. Coastal and island communities have made their living from the sea (and every other resource available to them) since time immemorial.
If the question is why we don’t eat more fish than we do, there may be no simple answer. Ireland has a lot of land-based agriculture (both meat and crops) so may be less dependent on seafood for that reason than, for example, Japan.
There is an old idea that the Irish don’t like eating fish because it was seen as a penance (fish on Fridays). I think this may be a bit of a canard, no longer relevant in the modern age if it ever really was.
Another interesting question is why Irish people don’t eat fresh-water fish. Central Europeans and Scandinavians happily eat carp, pike, perch, etc. In Ireland these are not eaten and are generally considered “dirty” or “muddy” fish. They are caught for sport but returned alive.
First thing I thought of was that Ireland has been invaded many times by sea.
There’s a tradition in some countries - Sardinia is an example - that people conquered by seaborne invaders turn away from the coasts, live only off the land, and abandon any maritime life. As recently as half a century ago, Sardinians didn’t even fish.
The Japanese have developed the intestinal flora to digest seaweed, over many generations. The rest of us sushi newbies just pass it as neutral fiber.
There was never enough seaweed to feed everyone. Think of the cultures who survive on “found” food like fish or bison: small bands of a few dozen. Even in places like New Guinea and Amazonia where plants grow like crazy, people still have to raise their own food to get enough protein.
As for the famine, fungus recognizes no national borders. The potato crop failed all across Northern Europe that year. Ireland exported beef and grain and butter while two million starved. 1849 in Ireland was no more a natural disaster than was 1932 in Ukraine.
What is the name of the specific protein, carbohydrate, what-have-you in seaweed that requires the Japanese-people-specific gut organism(s) to digest?
One reason I’ve heard given is the lack of a large boatbuilding industry in Ireland at the time. Irish fishing depended on currachs, smaller wicker boats covered in canvas or leather that couldn’t really take advantage of the fishing in deeper and more dangerous waters. Even if they had made a sufficiently large catch, the currach fisherman didn’t have the capital to buy salt that would allow the fish to be preserved long enough to transport it inland. There wasn’t a boatbuilding industry in Ireland at the time of the famine capable of turning out large boats in sufficient quantities for large scale deep sea commercial fishing, due either to insufficient timber, laws protective of English business interests, or several other factors, depending on who you ask.
But that’s answering the question about why no major Irish fishing industry, and says nothing about the traditional Irish diet.
Exactly so. Irish farmers weren’t so dependent on potatoes because they loved them so very much; they were so dependent on them because potatoes were the most efficient crop they could grow to feed themselves on the small plots of land which their British landlords allowed them to use for themselves (much of the rest of the land which they farmed was used to raise beef and crops for export, as Slithy Tove notes).
That’s what I thought the OP was asking; why the Irish didn’t develop an industry that would take advantage of the fishing available to them, particularly in the time of the famine. I’ve heard that those in coastal areas who did have fish in their diet fared somewhat better in the famine than those farther inland, but a much larger fishing industry that made fish readily available in the diets of those farther inland wasn’t available or feasable at the time of the famine.
I do no basic googling. But, as Dean Martin says, I don’t do any less. See below.
Seems so: I found this:
The Resources of the Irish Sea Fisheries
Richard Valpy
On the anomaly of rich Irish fishing stocks and poor utilization of same.
Conclusions and attempts at solving the problem:
No good inland roads, no decent ice technology, no good docks despite private and public capital (due to fraud), too much trawling, relying only on shoal fishing (even Dutch go on longer trips), bad boat building, “inefficient and spiritless” industry, and low demand. Fisherman and locations are analyzed as well.
All in all, a landmark source for this question.
The entire article is PDF but can be read on-line.
Paging An Gadaí…
TBH, anybody on a salt sea shore who doesn’t make salt is an idiot … :dubious:
[that was actually my main complaint with the first season ever of Survivor. Complaining about the dead boring bland rice with an ocean to make salt from or boil the rice in ocean water instead of potable to get the salt flavor. Tidal pools chock full of crustacians and sea weed, and an entire tropical forest of plants. :smack: How can you go hungry in such a fecund area.:rolleyes:]
Alas, I’ve no great knowledge of the matter. However, I shall comment that I’ve encountered the attitude along the lines of “The Irish starved while their seas were full of fish, what were they, a bit thick or something?”. Right now, with all the resources I have at hand, I’d be hardpressed to construct a boat. Even if I bought one, I’m not sure I’d get too far out to sea without drowning, then I haven’t a clue about how I’d fish. I mean I have a vague notion but I’ve not huge experience or knowledge of it.
Basically if I had to go fishing to stop from starving I can’t say I would be able to. Go back to the 1840’s and people with access to far fewer resources, and already racked by hunger and fever, how in the name of the blessed Jaysus would they be able to head out fishing had they not got experience of it before? I suppose there’s river fishing, but it has its own set of issues. I suppose with enough hours watching youtube tutorials and reading books about fishing I could get a grasp but that’s a luxury I can afford in the overfed comfort of early 21st C. Ireland.
I think with regard to getting the fish inland it’s worth noting that the rail network that would end up being fairly extensive only started being constructed in the early 1840s and it wasn’t until the 1880s that the whole country was covered.
“Why didn’t Paddy just fish?” is yet another specious argument used by those Potato Famine Deniers. 
Inefficient, perhapss, but hardly spiritless…
BTW, Celts & kelp figure in two movies: in The Field, Richard Harris and Sean Bean haul seaweed year after year to make topsoil for potato growing, until American Tom Berringer buys the land out from under them (unlike in The Quiet Man, it’s not all resolved by a friendly fistfight).
In **Man of Aran, ** Irish coastal-dwellers are shown risking their lives to find enough seaweed for topsoil, and fishing and shark-hunting in the nasty sea. Inspired by the earlier (and also somewhat fictional) documentary, Nanook of the North, it makes you wonder why the Irish didn’t move to the Arctic for easier lives as esquimos.
As you say though, it’s somewhat fictional. The real people’s lives on the islands, as tough as they were, weren’t nearly as precarious or difficult as made out in the film, at the time the film was created.