THE double tragedy off the south coast of Ireland last week shows again the perils faced by those who make their living from the cruel sea. Even with the latest technology and improved weather forecasting, the loss of two fishing trawlers and seven lives within a few hours of each other and just a few miles off the coast shows it’s still a very dangerous game.

It began last Wednesday with the Pere Charles trawler battling its way back to port through worsening weather from a herring fishing trip. A heavy catch was weighing down the vessel, and this may have been a factor. The trawler foundered in the heavy seas and sank instantly with the five crew on board.

A minute before, the boat had been in radio contact with its sister trawler 300 yards away and then vanished from sight in the poor visibility and off its sister’s radar screen, taking all five crew with it. It was only a few miles out from its home port of Dunmore East in Co. Waterford.

Immediately a big rescue effort began, and one of those who responded, in the teeth of a worsening gale, was another trawler called the Honeydew II. That trawler diverted as it was heading back to its home port of Kinsale in Co. Cork to join the search. But by the next morning, as the bad weather intensified, it too had become a casualty.

The Honeydew had a crew of four. The Irish skipper and a Polish crewman were lost, and two Lithuanian crewmen survived and were picked up later after surviving in a life raft on the raging sea for 17 hours.

They revealed that the Honeydew had been hit by a giant 45 foot high wave that cracked the side of the wooden vessel and let water flood in. It sank within minutes.

Both trawlers were good boats, over 75 feet long and with up to date equipment, and the two skippers were experienced and respected fishermen. Both had some foreign crew, something now common on Irish fishing boats. The Pere Charles crew included a Ukrainian.

Lives are lost at sea here every year, but the nature of this tragedy, with the failed rescue attempt, made it particularly poignant. Tragedy had been piled upon tragedy. The two communities in Dunmore East and Kinsale were overcome with grief, and a moving church service in which the wives and relatives comforted each other touched the hearts of the nation when it was seen on the TV news.

In the days after the double tragedy, the papers here were full of heartbreaking pictures as the search for bodies went on and the families — both Irish and foreign — tried to come to terms with what had happened. In situations like this, out of an understandable respect for the dead and the sensitivities of their loved ones, the media here refrain from asking difficult questions.

Instead there were heartbreaking stories. Patrick Coady, a young crewman on the Pere Charles, was the third generation of his family to be taken by the sea while fishing out of Dunmore East. The sea took his father a year ago, and his grandfather 21 years ago.

The papers reported that Patrick had given up fishing to work an onshore job for four years, but his love of the sea had brought him back, in spite of the dangers he knew only too well.

But sad tales like this of the courage of the fishermen and the terrifying conditions they can face did not answer the question that was unspoken on everyone’s lips here last weekend. That question was a simple one — what were the boats doing out in such atrocious weather? The weather had been bad before the tragedy happened, it was getting worse and the forecast was for more storm force winds.

Partly because I live in the fishing village of Howth in north Co. Dublin and know some of the fishermen from the large fleet of trawlers there, I know the answer to that question. The truth is that they were out there because they were driven to it by the need to make money.

This was not a case of incompetent sailors or un-seaworthy vessels. The records of those involved make that clear. Nor was it some kind of freak accident.

This was a case of trawlers being out at sea in conditions that were marginal, at best. It was a case of fishermen being out at sea at a time when a more cautious, low-risk policy might have kept them in port.

But a low risk policy is not a luxury that today’s fishermen can afford, and there is a tendency to gloss over the dangers. The seas in the middle of last week were described by a couple of old salts as “heavy but manageable” — in other words, fishing would be difficult but still possible. But what that really means is that risks are being taken.

What happened last week is the proof of that. The real reason the tragedy happened is that the European quota system that now controls fishing in all European waters is forcing fishermen here to operate in conditions when it would be better to stay at home.

The system is laudable in many ways, doing its best to deal with over-fishing and declining stocks, with some species now down to extinction levels. The quota system means strict limits on catches and on when boats can fish, often measured in weeks rather than months.

For herring — and the Pere Charles was returning from a herring trip — the season is now just a couple of months, ending early in February.

No matter how awful the weather, the herring boats have to make their money in the weeks they are allowed to fish which are in the depths of winter. The pressure is increased because the quota per boat is weekly and cannot be accumulated if a boat cannot fish — the boat’s unused quota for that week goes back into a general pool shared by other boats in the fleet.

On top of that, there is heavy financial pressure on fishermen trying to make repayments on boats and pay ever increasing fuel bills. It’s a recipe for stress and for stretching the boundaries on when it is safe to go to sea.

In the last few weeks here the weather has been atrocious, with very strong winds. The boats have already been limited in how much they could fish, and last week was a marginal situation when some boats stayed in and some went out.

It tends to be the younger skippers who go out in difficult conditions because they are the ones with big repayments to make on the boats they have bought. And it tends to be the younger Irish and immigrant crew men who are willing to go out with them even when the weather is bad because they also need to make the money.

Of course, all of this is a result of Ireland giving away its fisheries cheaply decades ago when we were so eager to join Europe to get the benefits of the Common Agriculture Policy. Big fleets of Spanish trawlers — and from other European countries — fish up to within sight of the Irish coast and they have been doing it for years. The result is that our waters are as over-fished as everywhere else.

Would we have managed our fisheries better if we had fought to keep a 50-mile exclusion zone around our island? Perhaps. But we can’t turn the clock back now, and we are part of the EU fishing regime whether we like it or not.

The result is an intensively controlled industry with quotas and limits and declining fish stocks. And what that means is that too many of our fishermen are taking risks that would not be accepted in any other industry.

Landlubbers don’t have much idea of what they face. But about 20 years ago I was given a unique insight into what a stormy night at sea on a trawler can be like, and I have never forgotten the fear.

At the time there were proposals to organize the deckhands on the trawlers around the country into a trade union and, since I lived in Howth, yours truly was the reporter detailed to go out on a fishing trip to describe a day in the life of your average crewman.

The skipper of the boat I was joining warned me that the forecast was mixed. Was it safe, I asked. “Ah ‘twill be safe enough ... but there’ll be no comfort in it,” he told me in his strong Kerry accent.

We left Howth in the afternoon and steamed north for hours until we were off the coast of Co. Down about 30 miles out from land. We were partnered by another boat, with which we were going to twin — a fishing method that involves dragging a huge net hauled between two boats.

After a big fry-up and lots of fun at my expense, we arrived at the fishing grounds and got down to business as darkness fell and the wind started to pick up. The start of the twinning involves bringing the boats close together to pass the ropes from one side of the net from one boat to the other. I remember that this was difficult because the other boat was going up and down in the waves like a high speed escalator.

But the ropes were passed and the other boat moved away out to open the enormous net and we started twinning, hauling the net behind the boats. We fished for an hour or two and I clung on as the weather worsened rapidly.

The crew made jokes as the waves hit, but eventually the decision was taken to abandon fishing and run for shelter. There was some trouble with ropes as our twin came back near us in the heaving seas. When I saw a crewman swinging an axe to cut a rope I knew we were not going to hang around.

It took us at least three hours to make shelter off the Down coast. The crew went below to sleep but I stayed in the wheelhouse, too terrified to close my eyes. The skipper was guiding the boat through the huge waves and talking excitedly on the crackling radio to our twin skipper.

He did not seem worried. But then I was worried enough for both of us.

Every few minutes the bows would rise up on a huge wave and then crash down into the trough on the other side, hitting with such force that the entire deck vanished before my eyes under a white boiling sea. For a moment only the wheelhouse was above water.

And then, just when I thought the boat would never rise up again, the foaming water would be running off the decks as we soared up again and the next wave lifted us.

It went on like that, hour after interminable hour. By daybreak, the wind was gone and we were steaming back along the coast to the harbor in Howth.

While the crew went off to buy more rashers and sausages and got ready for leaving again that evening, I went home to bed. I did not wake up for 12 hours.

The deckhands never got their union, mainly because they were all on shares of the catch and dodging tax. But I had got something — an awareness of what fishermen go through when the weather turns on them. I was thinking about that this week when the tragedy happened.