An Irishwoman's Diary

PITY the kill-joys who scuppered an Irish-American businessman’s plan to honour one of this island’s great inventors. Perhaps certain civil servants thought it was a joke when Mr Hillard Nagle proposed decommissioning a US submarine and mooring it in Liscannor, Co Clare.

Nagle, then chair of the Friends of Ireland group, contacted the Irish consul general in Boston in 1972 about naming the floating monument after Liscannor-born John Philip Holland, who developed the first submarine to be commissioned by the US navy.

One wonders what was in the mind of the bureaucrat — quoted in recently released National Archive documents — who argued that it would be difficult to disguise the identity of “a piece of American military equipment”.

In other parts of the world, redundant pieces of naval hardware have proved to be handy little earners — such as the Russian navy’s nuclear submarine Julliett 484,which was sold off during perestroika, was exhibited in Finland and Florida and provided the set for Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson in K-19: The Widowmaker. But then, as RTÉ’s marine correspondent Tom MacSweeney argues, “official Ireland” has never recognised the potential of our 7,000km-plus coastline.

This is an observation he has made on radio and television time and again – and, not surprisingly, it is a theme of his recently published memoir, in which he pays tribute to a man who articulated a similar view. As he recalls, the late great maritime historian Dr John de Courcy Ireland often wondered why our planet was not called “Ocean” instead of “Earth”.

MacSweeney’s “selection of stories” and impressions of people draws on material from 1,000 editions of his radio programme Seascapes, broadcast on RTÉ over the past 20 years. People like Waterford’s Capt Richard Farrell, the only living Irishman to hold a master’s foreign seagoing certificate for square-rigger ships.

People like Commander Bill King, who told MacSweeney he would have climbed Everest if he had had the health for it after surviving the entire second World War in noisy, claustrophobic tin boxes under the waterline. The commander, owner of a castle in Galway’s Oranmore, instead took to hunting and traversing oceans “up top” in yachts.

People like Kerryman Damien Foxall, professional award-winning international yachtsman, seven-time global circumnavigator, and a key member of the current Volvo Ocean Race entry Green Dragon. And MacSweeney records his first impressions of Moira Kearon of the Dun Laoghaire Motor Yacht Club, who reached her 80th year while still sailing her 23-foot boat, Mol Pol.

There’s Joe Murphy, the legendary Ringsend boat-builder who is said to have been the last shipwright to descend to the Liffey bed in the Dublin port diving bell. There are the former light-keepers and voluntary lifeboat crews and mariners and fishermen to whom he has given voice over many years. There are the silent men, made of metal, standing guard at Tramore, Co Waterford and Strandhill, Co Sligo.There is MacSweeney’s account of the second World War bombing of the Loch Ryan, a Skibbereen-registered schooner, and a family’s subsequent ordeal.

But the journalist’s personal observations, woven into the text, are equally fascinating. It was only after he was assigned to Cork in the 1970s as RTÉ’s first regional correspondent that he learned to swim. He credits a Kinsale fisherman for his decision to learn to sail. “Down here, you should have a boat,” the fisherman advised. How true it was. Five of the six counties from which MacSweeney reported touch the sea. Almost two-thirds of the State’s entire population now live within 10 miles of the coastline.

It wasn’t easy, once he had developed a passion. “Too many of your stories are watery,” an RTÉ personnel executive growled. Yet when Kevin Healy became controller of RTÉ radio, he backed the journalist’s initiation of a weekly maritime report.

Seascapes was supposed to last 15 minutes and to run for the “summer schedule” only. but such was the listener reaction that it “never came off air”, MacSweeney notes. Schedules were shuffled at times and he says that he attracted “in-house” criticism for his coverage of the Jeanie Johnston controversy.

He writes also about his “misunderstanding” with Joe English, skipper of NCB Ireland, the first ever Irish entry in the Whitbread (now Volvo) round-the world yacht race in 1989-90. MacSweeney had volunteered to sail on the yacht, and to report from the last leg of the race across the Atlantic.

Before setting sail from Florida for Southampton, the skipper publicly criticised MacSweeney for not wearing a crew shirt. “Are you a crew member or a journalist?” English asked him at an Irish-American supporters’ club party. Pragmatically, MacSweeney bit his tongue, nipped back to the media centre and changed.

He lost half-a-stone, fell through the galley roof, got swept back half the length of the boat and ate food tasting of “elastic bands”. He missed the farewell party and fell foul of airport security to put together his package for television news the following day. His affection is clearly for radio, however — his “theatre of the mind”.

And all those hours of public service broadcasting must have had some impact. Two of Tom and Kathleen MacSweeney’s three sons have taken to the sea as master mariners, one of them serving on the Asgard II. And a daughter-in-law, Sinéad Reen, was the first Irish woman to qualify as a deck officer and master mariner in the merchant marine.

Seascapes by Tom MacSweeney is published by Mercier at €24.99 hardback.