Fishing, Heritage, and the Irish Table

My connection to fishing is not academic — it is inherited. Growing up on the San Francisco Bay as the grandson of Irish immigrants, I learned early that the ocean is not just a resource. It is a reason to come home.

My great-grandfather worked in the copper mines on the Beara Peninsula. When the work went away, he traveled to the United States — to Butte, Montana, where Irish emigrant miners had followed the same vein of labor across the Atlantic. There, his brother died in a copper mine explosion. He returned home to Castletownbere, where my grandmother was born in 1921. At twenty-five, she and my grandfather — again with few opportunities for work — moved to Birmingham, where he worked on the railroads. At forty, they made their final journey with their four children to San Francisco, settling in a fog-filled neighborhood full of Irish immigrants remaking their lives a continent away.

It is on that shore that I learned to fish. It is on that shore that my life changed forever after a surfing accident in April 2020.

I spent years navigating the American healthcare system — a long, grinding fight to reclaim my own body. Coming out the other side of a successful surgery in December 2025, it was fishing that gave me back a sense of freedom and identity. Standing at the water's edge, reading a tide, waiting — these are not passive acts. They are a form of knowledge that lives in the body.

As an anthropologist, I have spent my career documenting what happens when that kind of embodied, inherited knowledge disappears — when corporations, policy decisions, or simple demographic attrition erase the cultural practices that hold communities together. I have seen it in California's farmworker communities. I have seen it on the warehouse floor. And I see it now in the waters off the Beara Peninsula.

The Castletownbere Project

In 2026, in partnership with the Irish South & West Fish Producers Organisation (IS&WFPO CLG), I will be conducting immersive ethnographic fieldwork aboard the family-owned whitefish vessels operating out of Castletownbere, Co. Cork — one of Ireland's last remaining strongholds of the traditional inshore fishing fleet.

The project, Maritime Sovereignty and the Irish Table is an effort to document a living heritage that is under direct and urgent threat. Since 2006, the Irish whitefish fleet has declined from approximately 420 vessels to roughly 140. In 2026, for the first time in forty years, EU quota decisions stripped Ireland of the Hague Preference protections that guaranteed Irish coastal communities a minimum share of their own waters. The result is a systemic inequality in which an Irish vessel out of Castletownbere may be forced to stop fishing after three or four days, while foreign industrial fleets harvest the same waters all season.

This is not a story about the end of an industry. It is a story about the people who refuse to let it end — and what it costs them.