The Fishes Without The Loaves

If he'd had bread, maybe fisherman Seamus O'Flaherty wouldn't have gotten himself into trouble for giving away fish to the hungry of Wexford. If you're serving fishes, you need loaves.

Like a good Christian, he cast his nets upon the waters and reeled in...not apostles, but monkfish.

Too much monkfish, actually. The European Union has rules on how many monkfish a vessel can haul in. Go over that quota and you're to toss those excess fish, all quite dead by this time, back into the sea.

To feed predator fish, perhaps. Or more likely, to rot.

Mr. O'Flaherty and his skipper Jimmy Byrne know that there are people in Ireland who are going hungry, and they know Irish history. How much food was exported by order of the British authorities in 1848 while people starved to death in the boreens?

So they boxed up the excess catch, listed it as an overage on EU-mandated reports, and put those boxes out on the quays in Wexford.

People were invited to help themselves to perfectly good fish that would otherwise have been thrown away.

And for that, the gardai were called out.

There's talk of Mr. O'Flaherty being prosecuted for violating the EU mandate that he discard perfectly good food, even if people go hungry, because that's the rule.

It's one thing to set a quota to prevent overfishing, which in the long run could damage the industry. Take too many fish and there's not enough to make new fish, which spells the end of that species.

But if the EU lets a fisherman overfish and then tells him to throw away the fish, it doesn't help solve an overfishing issue, if that is indeed the issue.

Mr. O'Flaherty can fall back on religious persecution and call out the ghosts of Black '47 if the authorities charge him with a crime. No jury in the land would convict him.

So it proves that no good deed goes unpunished, and in the bureaucratic tangle that is the European Union, charity does not begin at home but in the office of central planning. Anyone trying to follow their religion and give to the needy must be made to pay the price.