How then to convey the rest, to go beyond the geological topography and describe the other shaping forces and associations: climate and location, flora and fauna, culture, myth and legend, people, and over it all, the veneer of language and place name? Amazingly, Tim Robinson achieves this ultimate map in Stones of Aran: Labyrinth. It is a kind of mappa mundi, albeit of a very small world: Arainn, the largest of the three small Aran Islands off Ireland’s Atlantic coast, and better known to the English as Inishmore.

Robinson – Englishman, mathematician, artist, map maker and now writer – has been mapping the west of Ireland since he moved there 20 years ago. His maps, much loved in Ireland, reflect his many skills. They are drawn with rigour and imagination, imbued with a sympathy for place and language (Gaelic still clings on as the everyday language here), and conscious of the infinite fractal nature of coastlines.

What Robinson gives us in this book is their verbal complement, conveying what mere contours cannot. Anyone who knows the real thing will immediately recognise Robinson’s fascinating portrait of an island at the edge of an ocean. Each field, each building, and often each stone, has its own story. Robinson adds the detail page by page, just as bit by bit generations of Aran farmers made soil for their barren fields by breaking rock and adding seaweed.

I enjoyed his outsider’s love of and curiosity about the Irish language, while his own writing is intensely poetic.

But because it is the industry’s first genetically engineered product
and because market prices for salmon are low, no company is so far willing
to manufacture it.

Furunculosis, a virulent and usually fatal disease of salmon and trout,
is caused by the bacterium Aeromonas salmonicida, and infection with just
10 bacteria can produce clinical symptoms. Strains of the bacteria have
emerged that are resistant to more than one drug treatment. In Scotland,
an estimated £5 million is spent each year on antibiotics to treat
furunculosis and lost production costs at least as much again.

The live vaccine, BriVax, is a mutant of A. salmonicida, developed jointly
by Trinity College, Dublin and BioResearch Ireland, a state company established
to commercialise Irish biotechnology.

Last year’s safety trial was the first deliberate release in Ireland
of a genetically modified organism. According to Enda Kenny of BRI, the
vaccine was a relatively easy test case, since ‘the worst that could happen
was that it reverted to the wild type, which is pretty ubiquitous anyway’.

The trial found that, depending on water temperature, the vaccine persisted
in the fish for between 14 and 30 days, and in the nutrient-rich sediments
under the tanks for at most eight weeks.

The vaccine is currently being injected into the fish. The vaccine can
be given manually using a dose gun, as is the case on many fish farms, but
for large-scale applications it can be automated using a machine to sort
the fish and then inject them at a rate of some 4000 an hour. In either
case, the fish are lightly anaesthetised to reduce the stress of being handled.
BRI has applied for patents for the vaccine and the genetic manipulation
in all the major fish farming countries and is seeking manufacturing agreements.

There is, says Kenny, considerable interest in BriVax among aquaculture
firms and established vaccine companies, but so far no company has risen
to the bait. So BRI itself is now developing the process to gain regulatory
approval for large-scale applications, in partner-ship with the Belgian
firm Eurogentec and researchers at the University of Aberdeen, who are conducting
additional immunological studies.