`I wanted to write about the sea," said the poet Richard Murphy, "so I bought a boat." Murphy knew that like a poem, shipbuilding is both an art and a craft, requiring skill and inspiration. So began a kind of obsession that was to lead in no small measure to a revival of interest in the traditional Connemara sailing boats, including the now well-known Galway hookers. Yet in the 1960s there was little knowledge of those beautiful craft outside of the fishermen that owned them and the last great boat-building families of south Connemara and the Claddagh.
John Griffin, chief executive of the Jeanie Johnston Project, wanted the people of Co Kerry to know more about emigration to North America during the Famine years, so he set about building a tall ship. This is an enormous undertaking, costing an estimated £4.6 million.
My first impression on seeing the brochure was to question the motive for the project. Was this yet another aspect of the Famine industry, designed for the American market but offering little knowledge and much theory?
I met the project staff at its headquarters in Ashe Memorial Hall in Tralee. It quickly became clear that there was real work going on behind the handsome brochure. John Griffin is a tireless man who hasn't lost sight of the dream he started out with. He has already raised £1.2 million and linked up with the Irish Emigration Research Project (which indexes information on 19th-century emigrants to the US and Canada). He stresses the role of the voluntary board of directors and the generosity of sponsors, in particular FAS and the Elan corporation. After nearly five years of tireless planning it is largely a tribute to his dream that the great oak ribs of the replica emigrant barque Jeanie Johnston have risen over the sea at Blennerville just outside Tralee in Co Kerry. The ship is ready to be planked later this month.
Young people from both unionist and nationalist areas of Belfast have worked alongside trainees from Ballymun to Dingle to bring the project to this point, and it is supported and encouraged by Nobel prize-winner John Hume and endorsed by David Ervine, leader of the PUP.
Despite such widespread interest and support, it has not been easy for John Griffin and his team (a similar Famine ship project, the Dunbrody in New Ross, is running behind schedule due to lack of funds). There was no shipyard, so Griffin had one built.
Then he had to find a master shipwright capable of overseeing this complex construction, in a country that has severely neglected the shipbuilding industry. Michael O'Boyle from Killybegs in Co Donegal was recovering from an illness when he saw the advertisement in the Irish Skipper. He had been vaguely aware of the project from a television item. "I wonder do those people know what they're getting into," he thought at the time.
"I couldn't turn my back on it once I saw the ad. I had a sixth sense I'd get involved before I was invited." This soft-spoken man had previously built "everything from a punt to a trawler". He is calm in the face of the huge logistics of the job. The first task was finding enough oak. He needed trees that were 150 years old to produce the huge planks needed for the ribs of the ship. "There wasn't a forest in the country I didn't walk."
Then he had to locate machines large enough for the task in hand. Modern machinery wasn't strong enough, so out-of-commission machinery had to be fixed and a great deal of ingenuity employed by the trainees. Now he needs larch for the planking. "You're talking about planks 40-50 feet long and for that you need old trees." He won't get much of it in Ireland. "We might get it in Scotland and Sweden. We might even have to go to Russia." He has nothing but praise for the 30 or so workers under the supervision of his foreman at any given time. But Ireland is not training new shipwrights. What's the importance of this project for Irish shipbuilding? "I think it's very important. I think the powers that be should take notice. I'm trawling the world for men. There were 150 men working in Killybegs at one stage. The powers-that-be should take a look - there are no boat-wrights being trained."
He is in urgent need of people with boat-building skills and is particularly interested in hearing from caulkers. Caulking is the process of inserting filler, oakum in this case, in the spaces between the ship's planks, and is a very specific skill. He'd like to hear from Connemara boat-builders, particularly those skilled in traditional boat-building and he's happy to talk to anyone who's interested to go to Blennerville and have a look. His office is in the windmill, beside the yard. "In the centre leading to the shipyard, visitors can watch work progressing on the ship and learn about the original Jeanie Johnston, built in Quebec in 1847 for the Donovans, a merchant family from Tralee. Originally a trading ship, she took passengers during the Famine years, carrying some 3,000 passengers to Quebec, Baltimore and New York. Helen O'Carroll, the project historian, says the fares were cheaper to Quebec than to New York and the entry restrictions less stringent. The Jeanie Johnston was a reliable ship and had a very good health record. She never lost a passenger. O' Carroll is working to trace the story of a baby born on board ship in 1848.
Local interest in emigration history is being aroused through the building of the ship. People are now beginning to ask questions about those who left: Where did they settle? Who did they marry? What happened to their descendants? Several Americans of Irish descent have become involved in the project - both as shipwrights and in designing a virtual reality programme for children - and there is growing interest in the projected millennium voyage to 20 North American and Canadian ports.
President Bill Clinton has offered encouragement and has promised to meet the ship when she docks in Boston on her millennium voyage. The ship is being built with trainees from the North and the South, and the organisers of the maiden voyage in April 2000 say that the crew will be bringing with them the hopes and good wishes of a peaceful Ireland. It is perhaps of some small significance that we have sufficiently recovered from the ravages of history to undertake this voyage of the imagination, in a ship which is still less than half built, and while part of the funding has still to be found. Purveyors of the Celtic Tiger would call it confidence; I suspect normal people might call it faith.
Two days after my initial visit, I went back to the ship at 8.30 a.m. There was a half moon in the sky, and the mast of Christmas lights raised by the workers the previous day stood out against the background of Slieve Mish. I wasn't expected and intended spending a few minutes on my own inside the ship. Instead of a deserted site, I found about 30 people, including the FAS trainees, hard at work, both on the ship and in the workshops. The atmosphere was busy and quiet. "They're working to a schedule," Michael O'Boyle told me. They were also working with pride. Ciaran O'Regan is the foreman in charge of supervising up to 40 workers at any given time. What does the project mean to him? "This is going to resurrect the art of boat-building in this area. There was a big boatyard in Dingle since the 1950s. It was the heart of the town. Timber boat-building was dead in Dingle and now it's alive again." He and his brother Peter are two of the 20 or so local people working on the ship. Both he and his father before him worked in the boatyard in Dingle until it closed about eight years ago. What does the project mean to him personally? "It's the chance of a lifetime for me to work on a ship this size." How did he feel about working with boat-wrights from other countries? "No problem in the world. We could learn a lot from watching the way they work on the Jeanie Johnston."
I got my few minutes in the bowels of the ship, standing on the great oak keel. I was trying to imagine what the young women, many widowed, others single, had felt when the hatches were battened down out in the Atlantic, at the point where there was no going back. I was thinking of my own grandmother, who left for Boston at 16, in a more modern ship, 40 years after the last voyage of the Jeanie Johnston. There were no ghosts on this new ship but I wondered about the emigrant Irish, arriving by boat, battened into the hold, destitute and often with young children, fleeing hunger and famine and persecution. Maybe they could tell us what the passengers might have been feeling, especially those leaving in the terrible years after Black '47, before Erin's Daughters were welcome in America.