Funny to see this thread drifting back onto topic again after all the rants and venom.

The Irish apparent historic aversion to fish is hard to explain. It does seem to be accepted that some regions close to the sea survived the famine better than inland regions partly because people resorted to fishing, yet the Skibbereen area and Co. Mayo are often cited as particularly hard-hit by the famine. And as has been observed, there are fish in lakes and rivers too. I think the overfishing argument is an anachronism.

I would have thought that the appropriation of fishing rights by landlords would have been enough to turn poaching into the major national sport, but that doesn't seem to have happened. So were inland fishing rights other than for salmon ever enforced?

Another issue which I'm surprised not to have seen so far on this thread, and maybe it's a sign of the times, is the practice of Friday abstinence. When I was a lad, Catholics were obliged to abstain from eating meat on Fridays, and fish was the alternative. This gave fish a bit of an image problem, and the compulsion associated with it was generally cited as explaining the Irish lack of enthusiasm for fish and seafood generally.

In more recent times (say the last twenty years), it has been the tourists who have led the way in raising the status of seafood in Ireland, and seafood restaurants are now among the most prestigious, but seafood just doesn't feature in what might be called "vernacular" or "traditional" cooking. It was largely due to French interest that smoked salmon has progressed from being a virtually unknown dish in Ireland to a perceived national specialty. *ROT (really on topic) A bit like the folk music, actually: if it hadn't been for Americans liking the Clancy brothers and Germans liking the Fureys and the Dubliners, we might never have had a folk revival in Ireland at all.

Incidentally, when I was a child in Dublin in the 1950s, crab, prawns and even lobster (which could not be exported for technical and economic reasons) were quite cheap and we would often have them as a late-night snack, but my mother would never have thought of serving them as a main meal.

And on the corned beef thing, it was undoubtedly a popular traditional dish, but not particularly associated with St Patrick's Day. A possible Irish specificity is that, when made from silverside it is a good-quality meat and doesn't have any poverty or spam associations. In rural Ireland, roast spiced beef was traditionally a Christmas specialty.

And finally, on the subject of Irish stew, which has also remained mysteriously absent from this thread, Irish stew is made from mutton, not lamb, which has an entirely different taste. But as Irish farmers are now producing lamb for the French market and as Irish people have acquired a taste for it, mutton seems to be completely unobtainable in Ireland. I've eaten what purported to be Irish stew during an Irish week here in Brussels, but because it was made with lamb it was neither a good stew nor a tasty bit of lamb.