Martin McLoughlin

This process has been working for hundreds of years, if not thousands. Man would have originally smoked his meat and his fish to preserve it for the wintertime when food wasn’t as plentiful. So, a lot of fishing boats would have fished here. They would have gone out to catch the likes of herrings. They would have taken them in at night-time. There would have been a whole crowd of people. They smoked the herrings. They’d fillet them and put them into a brine for about maybe 20 minutes. And the brine would be made up of mainly salt. There would be a dye that they put into it to bring it to that nice red colour. They’d take the fish out of the brine, and then there’d be another group of probably ladies, and they would hang their herrings on sticks. There would have been probably in the region of 15 hooks on either side, so they would have fit 15 herrings on either side. So, they had to have two women, and as I say, it was usually women, and they’d normally be working together, and they’d be working at a good pace. These sticks then were taken, and what they were doing was hanging them up in these huge, big kilns. And then they would have lit their fire underneath it. Then the process then of taking down the herrings and packing them and getting them ready for export.

It was very labour intensive and very hard work. It wasn’t a particularly nice job. When you’re working with dye and the dye is in the herring, and the herring is on your hands, and it’s on your apron, your boots, it’s in your clothes; the smell of smoke as well, you can imagine the smoke that was there. There was nothing nice about it, but it was very interesting to see it.

Unfortunately, when the slave trade was, an awful lot of Howth herring ended up being exported to Africa, and the reason being that is to feed slaves going to America. So, an awful lot of the boats would have done a round trip and Liverpool would have been part of that round trip. Howth fishing boats used to fish the fish, smoked in Howth, exported to Liverpool, put on these big cargo ships, who would have brought it down, their herring then would have ended down in Africa. They would have loaded their cargo of slaves and those slaves would have been fed Howth herring on their journey across to America. The reason why they used herrings more than anything else: it was a cheap product, because meat was too expensive, and vegetables and fruit wouldn’t last. I’m interested in it, but I’m not proud about it. But history is what it is.