An Irishwoman's Diary

SIMON Coveney doesn’t strike one as a radical, but a proposal which he has recently endorsed might be described as . . . well . . . pretty daring.

It’s not even in the small print, but is listed right up there among “key actions” in his new report on making the most of our blue resource.

Turn to page 24 of Harnessing Our Ocean Wealth, and it identifies a need to “embed knowledge” of this potential treasure within the educational system.

The “thick plottens”, as they say, for the next paragraph is yet more dangerous in tone. It counsels the Government to “consider options for the inclusion of marine studies in the secondary school curriculum”.

Jonathan Swift, Thomas Davis and Arthur Griffith must be breakdancing in their graves.

They had no national seabed survey at their disposal when they foresaw the potential of a maritime economy, and none of the technology to confirm that the real map of Ireland is 10 times the landmass, with extensive deepwater corals and diverse marine life.

They wouldn’t have known that the Atlantic fetch and geological composition of this coast could create surf to match Hawaii; or that those rollers could generate enough energy to rival untapped hydrocarbons on the Continental Shelf. Yet it would come as no surprise to them when Irish adventurers reached farflung outcrops, founded foreign navies, and designed boats and nets and ships and sails that would take on the best in the world.

So Simon Coveney will have no shortage of literature to draw on when infiltrating school booklists, amending texts, and creating games and graphic novels. The research of the late maritime historian Dr John de Courcy Ireland – much of it now out of print – might challenge a few myths and shibboleths. A new atlas of the Irish coastline would also be a grand addition to school library shelves.

In fact there is an ocean of literature for the Minister to choose from. Turn to page 15 of Cruising Ireland by Mike Balmforth and Norman Kean, and the essay on “High Stool Days” is enough to have any reader rooting for the lifejacket. Winkie Nixon’s wry and often lyrical prose paints pictures of “neighbourhood Cape Horns”, the “gluepot ports” of the south, and the enchantments of the west coast, which, he says, is less a place and more “a frame of mind”.

As Balmforth and Kean explain, Cruising Ireland is a companion to the invaluable volumes of sailing directions published by the Irish Cruising Club (ICC). Approach any port without those navigational directions on deck at one’s peril; but one of the difficulties the ICC editors always faced in repeated reprints of their pilotage “bibles” was the amount of local information they had to omit.

Now, their companion gives ample scope and space to the stories behind the extensive art on Wicklow’s harbour’s wall, behind Kinsale’s connection with Robinson Crusoe, behind the “jaunty tilt” to the leaning tower of Waterford’s Ardmore.

Chris Stillman writes about Valentia island’s tetrapods and Padraig Whooley extols the best whale watching waters in Europe, while Libby Purves and Tim Severin are among guest contributors. The photographs, by Kevin Dwyer, Geraldine Hennigan and many ICC members and friends resemble nothing less than postcards from paradise.

One of the early researchers for the ICC was the late Wallace Clark, author of the classic Sailing Round Ireland, which, along with his posthumously published The Call of the Running Tide could also grace school shelves.

Born into a south Derry linen business, Clark had no previous family connections when he developed what his son Bruce describes as a “keen and mysterious intimacy” with the ocean. It would lead to many voyages and several books, ranked among the finest pieces of literature on navigating these waters.

“I have always thought of Wallace Clark as a Viking”, Billy Patterson says in The Call of the Running Tide, the book written by Clark “with a little help” from friends. Patterson was one of 13 crew selected in 1963 by Clark to recreate Colmcille’s voyage by currach from the North to the Scottish island of Iona.

Although he found his fellow oarsmen included several Church of Ireland clergy, the recruit had some second thoughts about his own ability for the trip when he found himself hanging over the gunwale, and wishing he was one of several cattle in distant fields.

Patterson would discover that this Viking “loved poetry, had a good heart, deep feelings for his family, a caring concern for his shipmates”, and “an interest in the lives of others”. His contribution is one of a number interspersed with Clark’s stories of adventures to Cape Horn, Norway, the Azores and the Adriatic, which was almost complete before the author died in May, 2011.

The reminiscences in this last work reveal a little more about his father’s motivation, according to Bruce Clark, who co-edited the text with Tara Mackie.

Reared in a “deeply conservative, rule bound” Northern Ireland, and called by birth to an “august institution”, there was little scope for “individual initiative” or “wild spontaneous behaviour”, he notes. So “the sea was his liberation”.

The Call of the Running Tide by Wallace Clark is published by Rathlin Books, and author royalties will go to the Royal National Lifeboat Institution.