An Irishwoman's Diary

LADY Gaga they are not, nor would they have set Glastonbury festival in their sights. Yet when the Cornish Fisherman’s Friends group recently received that £1 million offer from Universal records, Waterfordman Colm Long wasn’t too surprised.

Long knows the Port Isaac singers well, and he would have loved to have taken that Universal phone call himself. Indeed, he and his group Hooks and Crookes wouldn’t mind a top billing alongside their colleagues at Glastonbury this year. However, the Waterford group are pretty busy as it is, thanks to a growing international interest in the sea shanty as a musical art form.

Long’s journey began over a pint back in the winter of 2004, when plans were being laid to host the prestigious Tall Ships race start in Waterford. Shanties were suggested as a form of shore entertainment. A lucky number group of 13 was formed, and the amateur singers began to rehearse in the back room of Kennedy’s of Callaghan, a thatched hostelry on the road out to Dunmore East, every Monday night.

“We had so much fun that we had to keep singing,” Long says. Their first “foreign” foray was to the Falmouth Sea Shanty Festival, where they met 15 other combinations who were as eclectic and enthusiastic as themselves. In 2007, they hit Paimpol in France for the Festival du Chant de Marin, and felt they had come home. After all, the “shanty” is from the French verb, chanter, to sing.

When seafaring was a life-threatening pursuit, and “choice” didn’t enter the employment equation, shanties provided a form of both discipline and therapy. As Long explains, crew on ocean-going sailing ships, and latterly on steamships plying short coastal routes, led a life of exhausting manual labour.

Day and night watches were peppered with periods of boredom or terror – depending on the weather. The rhythm of the shanty helped crews to work in unison, which was essential when lifting a half-ton anchor or raising a heavy wet canvas sail. Songs with a distinct rhythm and pace were sung to pass time in doldrums, or as a form of lullaby at home – although superstition dictated that true shanties should only ever be aired at sea.

Significantly, Long discovered that there are no naval shanties. “On naval men-of-war craft, precision was provided by the thump of a drum,” he says. “Drudgery and boredom drew no sympathy in the minds of sea-lords like Nelson. Sailors were motivated to keep up the pace out of fear . . .”

Hooks and Crookes mined the rich vein of music, and over the past three years they have performed in Germany, the Netherlands, England and France. Last year they sang at the International Sea Shanty Festival in Langesund, Norway. After repeated appeals for same, the amateur singers decided to organise the first dedicated shanty festival here.

Over 25 different groups, including Drunken Sailor from Germany and De Kaapstander from the Netherlands, will travel to the Waterford Seafaring Festival of Music and Song, which opens on Friday, May 28th continues till Sunday (May 30th). Unfortunately, the invite issued to Port Isaac’s Fisherman’s Friends in Cornwall arrived just after news of their big record deal, but they will be there “in spirit”. The internet-based Scuttlebutt Radio has devoted its May programme to the Irish event.

And it won’t be all “heave-away, haul-away” stuff, Long promises. Expect songs to bring a tear to your eye and “make the hair stand on the back of your neck . . .” (More information from www.hooksandcrookes.com, or from tourist offices in the south-east. The 100 performances planned for 20 venues in Waterford will be free.) Incidentally, Hooks and Crookes takes its name from one of Europe’s oldest lighthouses over the border in Wexford. The “Hook”, as it is known, is profiled in a stunning new paperback photo essay, entitled Ireland’s Lighthouses, which has just been published by maritime photographer, John Eagle, for Collins Press.

FURTHER ALONG the coastline, this Friday is also an auspicious day for Gary McMahon and a team of master shipwrights who have been working on restoration of a very special vessel. The ketch Ilen is as significant in Irish maritime history as the Asgardor it successor, Asgard II. It was designed by pioneer Conor O'Brien, the first Irishman to sail around the world in a small boat, and was built by the Fisheries School in Baltimore, west Cork.

Bearing the name of a west Cork river, it was launched in 1926 and found its way to the Southern Ocean, having been commissioned by the Falkland Islands Company to serve as an inter-island trading vessel. It plied those challenging waters for over 50 years, before Gary McMahon secured its return to Ireland in 1998.

McMahon was so convinced that the Ilen represented the “perfect expression” of an Irish sailing vessel that he formed a not-for-profit maritime trust to reconstruct it, and held a number of “big boat build” workshops in the west Cork boatyard owned by Hegartys of Oldcourt. There is still a lot of work to do on deck beams, planking and suchlike, but a celebration of what’s been accomplished so far will be marked on Friday with Glenstal Abbey forester, Brother Anthony Keane at 5pm.

Master shipwrights Liam and John Hegarty and Fachtna O'Sullivan will explain how 27 sturdy frames of oak were put in place, and Criostóir MacCarthaigh of UCD, editor of Traditional Boats of Ireland, will speak about classic wooden boats and Ireland's maritime heritage.

"The tide has turned," McMahon says. "The Ilen. . . on sturdy keel is building up, gaining strength and moving unstoppably towards the sea". The next workshop to that end runs June 23rd to 25th. Details on www.bigboatbuild.com