Abstract

This article explores the limits of the culture of improvement in eighteenth-century Ireland, through the first case study of Irish fishery legislation. It suggests that the many laws and bills dedicated to 'improving' the Irish fishing industry were in fact protectionist and self-serving in orientation, up until at least the very late eighteenth-century. It also argues that the backers of this legislation used the cult that had built up around the idea of improvement in order to lend their schemes moral legitimacy, which they were able to do because it was by its very nature a protean concept.