Keep Mussel Dredgers Out of Kinsale

Kinsale Habour is one of the jewels in the Wild Atlantic Way's crown, and among the most famous locations for tourists who appreciate the history, culture, and pristine environment. The area around the town is often speckled with sailboats, busy fishing vessels, marine life, and tourists. Kinsale is a community that looks to the future while maintaining a deep sense of connection to its roots, and it the people take great pride in their town and its surroundings.

Now the town's habour is under threat from a toxic and disruptive form of aquaculture called mussel dredging, which recently left a region of the Dublin Bay smelling like corpses [1]. Outside of Ireland, mussel dredging has had equally devastating effects in places like Vietnam where local fishermen discovered that the seabed had become a "graveyard" [2]. The knock on effects that this sort of rancid activity could have on Kinsale's tourism economy would be devastating for the town -- and for so little in return.

It's also well known that mussel dredging can wreak havoc on the marine life around it [3]. Unlike more sustainable mussel harvesting practices, mussel dredging disrupts all of the seafloor life around it, leaving little left but jellyfish. Dolores Smith, a Dalkey resident who runs an inshore fishing and boat-hire company, summed up the effects on her livelihood: "The damage caused by the dredgers is absolutely enormous, there are stretches of seabed that have been obliterated."

Therefore, we are asking the Aquaculture Licensing office of the Department of Agriculture to deny all mussel dredging licenses in the Kinsale Harbour.

[1] https://afloat.ie/port-news/fishing/item/34164-mussel-dredgers-leave-dublin-coastline-smelling-like-corpses
[2] https://newsable.asianetnews.com/south/vizhinjam-dredging-seabed-turns-graveyard-for-mussels
[3] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/267035134_Mussel_dredging_impact_on_epifauna