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Pat Smyth, a civil servant with the National Assistance Board in West Tyrone from the 1930's to the 1950's, recalls his memories, experiences and the larger than life personalities he encountered on the way.
West Tyrone rivers are known to anglers world wide and Strule pearls are also world famed, but in my ten years on the banks of the river I never saw a pearl, nor heard of any finds.
In summer, angling was sometimes spoiled because of low clear water. Any fish lurking in deep pools in the shadows played hard to get (very hard to get). However, West Tyrone has more wet days than dry ones in summer and it wasn't all sorrow for local fishing enthusiasts.
The lure was all around me, especially in my digs, but I did not get hooked. Donning all-weather gear and going fishing in poor weather was not my scene. I had had enough of that growing up on the farm when I had had little choice but to work out-of-doors in all weathers.
In retrospect, it is a wonder I didn't get hooked. I had two renowned disciples of Isaak Walton as colleagues and close friends: Ernie Hamilton, the secretary of Omagh Anglers' Association and Sam Anderson a renowned master fly-tier. Both were authorities in the field and internationally known.
Sam was a Ministry of Labour clerk at Lurgan, and a Fermanagh man who had been recruited in the nineteen-twenties as an 'A' Special to guard the Duke of Abercorn and other local State personalities, by Dawson Bates, the first Minister of Home Affairs at Stormont.
He was an expert at tying flies, possibly one of Ireland's best, and fishermen, including some Catholic bishops, beat a path to the door of his little workshop at Duck Street, Magheralin.
In the nineteen-fifties he and I were under one roof for a time at the new Government office at Lurgan, and the first morning that I arrived early I was intrigued to hear medleys including 'Boys of Wexford' and the 'Oul Orange Flute' resounding in the corridors. I found Sam happily tootling a flute, perched on the corner of his desk.
Ernie and I spent many tedious hours researching land folios, trying to unravel the tangled skein of land titles in Wet Tyrone where wills and intestacies were mostly not administered for many generations. Judge Charlie Shiels had similar problems in the County Court and many an idle hour I spent on my way home from the office, listening to court cases over which he presided.
Small holders in Tyrone fought many hard battles in the courts, below and at County Court level, over rights-of-way and trespass, usually with no more than a few roods of useless barren mountain land at stake.
Charlie habitually propped his elbow on the bench and patiently listened with rapt attention to each witness with only a hint of a smile on his face, although it was obvious that he was immensely enjoying the cut-and-thrust of debate expressed mostly in earthly Tyrone idioms, real life drama, mostly farce, at its best and wonderfully educational and entertaining.
Often cases went on endlessly hour-after-hour, with the judge in no hurry to sum up: on the contrary, he kept the craic (jokes) going.
In fishing season, the debate raged in the digs daily about the state of the local rivers, the right flies, etc. It seemed to me as an outsider, that there never existed the ideal conditions which the anglers yearned for.
There was either too little water or a flood. The fish in a particular pool were too wary. The fly wasn't quite right. Some 'yahoo' on the bank had scared off 'the Big One' just when yer man had coaxed it to emerge from the black hole under the Leap Bridge out the Beragh Road. The saga was endless.
I was even persuaded to tag along on a few memorable occasions but never a bite did I witness as I hung around, motionless and bored, on the bank, well out of sight of the wary prey.
Omagh and district may well be described as an angler's paradise. Its rivers Drumragh, Strule and Fairy Water, are well stocked with salmon and trout: indeed during the past five years, The Omagh Angler's Association has released a quarter of a million trout fry into these waters and already anglers are reaping a rich reward.
Pat Smyth, 2001
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