AN IRISHMAN'S DIARY

WHEN Tucks Tweedy signs over his job shortly to a computer named Datac, be will be breaking with a practice extending back 1,600 years. It will be a personal wrench. Tucks grew up less than half a mile from the oldest lighthouse in the Irish and British isles.

The "PK" or principal keeper, who will become "AK" (A for attendant) when it is automated this year, also spent his youth on one of the most dangerous stretches of coastline in these islands.

Much of the shipping traffic from the Americas, the East and the Mediterranean passed by the coast of Wexford en route to Irish Sea ports over the centuries. Note the first issue of the Lifeboat Journal in 1852 "There is no part in the United Kingdom in which wrecks are more frequent than on the coast of Wexford..."

Not surprising then also that the inhabitants of the coast should have had a slightly contradictory attitude to the sea, with its frightening tidal races off Carnsore Point. "The Graveyard of a Thousand Ships" was also a source of income for some, according to Richard Roche, journalist, historian and author of Tales of the Wexford Coast. There is nob greater term of abuse to a Wexford person than to link their blood line to the "Kill'ems and Ate'ems".

`Lurid epithet'

The "lurid epithet" is one deserving of some explanation, Roche adds. Certainly, wrecking was a lucrative practice. One technique involved tying a lighted lantern to the horns of a cow grazing on a strategic cliff top. "In the darkness and from the deck of a storm tossed ship near the coast, the bobbing lantern looked like the riding light of another vessel at sea.

Were Wexford wreckers also cannibals? Roche a Wexford man himself is inclined to believe not. Yet one 18th century folk tale does tell of two boats being washed ashore, and bodies vanishing. "Some locals were said to have gnawed the fingers off the victims to get at their valuable rings.

Erected to warn of the dangers, and almost as old as the Pharos light of La Corunna in northern Spain, the Hook light was sometimes blamed for a bit of inadvertent wrecking. After a long and trying transatlantic crossing, skippers often mistook Hook for the Eddystone light and set a course for what they believed to be Plymouth Sound. In one winter alone, 1805-06, some 17 large ships ran ashore on Ballyteigue strand. In 1877, 11 ships were wrecked between Kilmore and the Hook light.

Salvage from some of those incidents helped to build south Wexford villages like Ballygarrett and Kilmore Quay, the latter now boasting a new harbour development. The restaurant attached to the Kilmore Quay hostelry, the Wooden House, is actually the deck house of a Greek ship, which foundered in 1861.

Roche's tales

Roche's tales, published by Duffry Press, Enniscorthy, Co Wexford, includes one of the most comprehensive lists of Wexford wrecks and groundings ever assembled. Compiled with Tom Williams, the list runs to 879, and includes three recorded off Cahore Point, Little Saltee and Carnsore respectively during Christmas, 1895 when a Finnish ship, Palme, also ran aground in Dublin Bay and the entire Dun Laoghaire (then Kingstown) lifeboat crew drowned in an attempted rescue.

Even as the Dun Laoghaire lifeboat crew marked that centenary this Christmas followed a few weeks later by the unveiling of the Leinster (anchor) to mark the island's worst maritime disaster on record a similar ceremony was held in Dungarvan, Co Waterford, south west of the Hook Point light. On December 22nd, 1895, a three masted ship the Moresby of Liverpool, was on passage from Cardiff to South America when it was driven into Dungarvan Bay. The ship's master, his wife and child and 7 of the crew lost their lives.

The incident has a particular significance for Dungarvan, and for the Abbeyside Pattern Committee which has published a booklet dedicated to the

Moresby crew and to those who volunteered to crew the lifeboat. When the ship came into Dungarvan and anchored, to shelter from the violent easterly gale, the Ballinacourty lifeboat put out and asked if it needed assistance. It was turned away by the Moresby skipper, Captain Coomber, who thought that he was in Cork. He was not. The anchor dragged, the ship ran up on the Whitehouse bank and began to break up under pounding seas.

As Coomber ordered the rigging to be cut away, he was sure that the lifeboat would return. It did not. Only on the forenoon of December 24th, when the captain, his wife and child and some of the ship's complement had perished while trying to swim ashore, did volunteers from Dungarvan, under Captain John Veale, return with only two of the regular crew from Ballinacourty. They took seven men on board, two of whom died.

Court of inquiry

There was a court of inquiry under the 1894 Merchant Shipping Act, and the Ballinacourty lifeboat coxswain was cleared. Failure to render help was due to his inability to muster a crew. The lifeboat volunteers were unwilling to risk their lives a second time, when their first valiant offer had been turned down.

Michael Hogan, one of the lifeboat crew who did venture out, died on January 29th, 1896, as a result of exposure. The lifeboat was relocated to Helvick Head on the south side of the harbour, and eventually withdrawn from service the station was closed in 1969. The RNLI intends to reopen Helvick, and one in Fethard, this year.

Thirteen of the fores by crew were buried, unidentified, in a communal grave in St Mary's Church of Ireland, Dungarvan. So were some of their fellow mariners. "I don't blame the captain for not leaving the ship when the lifeboat came the first time," one survivor, Henry Blount, wrote in an account reprinted in the Abbeyside Pattern Committee's booklet. "If he had done so, the lifeboat men would have stepped aboard and claimed salvage".

"It has been a tearful experience for me and one I shall never forget."