Although a provisional date of 5 July has been listed for sheep race day, things have been worryingly quiet as far as one of Sark patients’ major fund-raisers is concerned. (Picture by Steve Sarre, 0328022)
GIVEN my origins, the last thing I want to do is to needlessly stick my neck out and start throwing my tuppence-worth into the minor local difficulties caused by the fishing dispute between Guernsey and Jersey.
However, being a resident now of the small rock between the two larger islands, I don’t think I can allow the comments about Sark made last week by an unnamed Guernsey fisherman go unchallenged.
The issues he raised were, to quote him directly: ‘How can Sark qualify for a 12-mile limit when they are not big enough to be classed as a territory, how can they have a territorial limit and why should the Guernsey taxpayer pay for Sea Fisheries to patrol Sark’s waters when they don’t put a penny into the kitty?’
Now, I may have missed something somewhere along the line but who said Sark is not large enough to be classed as a territory and what criteria are adopted in determining what is a territory and what is not? Quite frankly, I can see no difference in this respect between Sark and Guernsey, despite the wholly erroneous impression to the contrary which exists in certain quarters.
Both islands have an independent legislature which requires royal assent for primary law, neither can legislate for the other without consent and neither is a member in its own right of bodies like the United Nations, the European Union or even – in the context of attending heads of government conferences, the Commonwealth, so if Sark is not a territory, then, using this criterion, neither is Guernsey.
But all that is almost trivia when compared to this anonymous fisherman’s principal point – that Sark does not put one penny into Guernsey’s kitty. Virtually everything Sark needs in order to exist – from boxes of matches to the materials needed to build hotels – comes through Guernsey companies and, given that Channel Islanders are sometimes described as Scots shorn of their generosity, I somehow doubt that this is done without both profit being made and tax accruing to the Guernsey exchequer.
Furthermore, specific services such as legal assistance and prison and policing charges are paid for under agreed arrangements so I am puzzled as to where the fisherman finds evidence to support his sweeping generalisation that ‘they [Sark] don’t put a penny into the kitty’.
As I and others have argued frequently in the past, Guernsey does very well indeed out of Sark – as one Sarkee put it to me quite recently, it’s like having an extra parish in terms of revenue but without the social expenditure which drains the exchequer.
A visit to the Medical Centre earlier this week reminded me that precious little has been heard recently about the two principal fund-raising events for the Professor Saint Medical Fund – which subsidises the cost of prescribed medication for Sark residents – the sheep race meeting in July and the water carnival the following month.While there are mixed feelings about the three-day carnival – it raises a great deal of money but, as with many things, there is a price to be paid in terms of attracting a minority who view it as a yob-culture drinking competition – it is generally accepted that the sheep race meeting, with its extended family-orientated attractions, is a wonderful weekend which shows Sark at its very best.
According to the Sark Tourism website, a provisional date of 5 July has been set for Dave Scott and his dog to bring their woolly jumpers to the Millennium Field – there is no mention, provisional or otherwise, of the water carnival so I presume that is now part of the island’s history – but that is now less than five months away.
While organising the sheep racing is perhaps a little easier than planning the three-day carnival, it is still an awful lot of work and it is perhaps understandable that the faithful and hard working few who have struggled to keep these much appreciated events going in recent years possibly feel that it’s time for others to lend a hand.
I don’t know whether that is the case or not, but it would be a shame if the sheep racing were to go the way of the carnival – not only for the effect it would have on the charity for which it is a fund-raising mainstay but also because it brings so much pleasure to visitors and residents alike.
I hope, even at this fairly late stage – but certainly not too late – that my pessimism is misplaced and that the event will go ahead. It would be a real shame if it didn’t.
The email address for comments is fallesark@sark.net
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