Will the SNP honour its commitment to the Isle of Arran?
The Daily Telegraph reports, 27th May 2015: The Scottish Government is set to reject pleas by islanders to protect the seas around their coast
From afar, the hills of the Isle of Arran famously resemble a sleeping warrior. But the people of the largest island in the Firth of Clyde are alarmed. For they fear that the Scottish Government — run by the supposedly green, nationally triumphant SNP — is on the point of betraying them and the seas off their coasts.
Holyrood is expected to finalise plans for special zones intended to protect Scotland’s most sensitive marine areas and safeguard both their ecology and their fisheries. But islanders believe these measures will fall far short of what is needed and what they had been led to hope for. If so, the SNP will be undermining one of the most remarkable bids to save the seas undertaken anywhere in the world, one that has just won an international award.
Until 30 years ago the Clyde boasted rich fisheries. It was famous for herring — with average landings of 14,000 tons a year — and also supported good takes of cod, hake, saithe and whiting. But then the last restrictions on inshore fishing were removed, and catches have since dwindled almost to zero. Jobs both in commercial and recreational fishing crashed.
Now more than 99 per cent of the take from the once-rich fishery is shellfish, especially scallops, and prawns. But harvesting both involves disturbing the seabed – destroying what the Government itself calls an “amazing array” of life and leaving watery brown deserts behind.
Howard Wood, the owner of a local garden centre, watched it all happen while diving in his spare time. Twenty-five years ago he and a fellow diver, Don MacNeish, set out to try to reverse the decision, sinking their savings into launching a grass-roots campaign. At first, he says, they were “very naive, writing letters to anyone we thought had influence”, and getting nowhere. But then they realised that the key was winning community backing.
They spent years holding meetings and talking to clubs and schools, “slowly, slowly building up local support” until now about half the island’s adults are active supporters of their Community of Arran Seabed Trust (Coast). It helped, he says, that everyone knows them, and that “we were not green tree-huggers coming in to say ‘you must do this’ ”.
Popular support made politicians listen, and in 2008 the Government eventually agreed to Coast’s proposal to set aside a small 1.03sq mile area of Lamlash Bay in the south east of the island as an experimental “no-take zone” where all catches were prohibited. The results have been dramatic. Monitoring by the University of York has shown that populations of lobsters have doubled, scallops more than tripled, and that fishermen are getting better catches outside the protected area.
Last year the SNP government announced that the zone would be one of 30 new Marine Protected Areas for “rare habitats”, and the islanders thought they were winning. But even though Richard Lochhead, Scotland’s environment secretary, describes Coast as “trailblazers”, the detailed proposals don’t even consider its plans. Even the government’s most radical option for conserving the area would, it admits, ensure that most of the dredging and trawling went on as normal.
The Highland Council has condemned the protected area proposals as “unambitious” and there are some last-minute signs that the government is reconsidering in the light of public pressure. Wood says that, unless there is a big change, he will go on campaigning. “We have not been around all this time to give up now,” he says. This is one Arran warrior who has no intention of sleeping any time soon.
Source: The Daily Telegraph, 27th May 2015. For the full text, see www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/environment/conservation/11624817/SNP-betrays-promise-to-Isle-of-Arran.html
