Layered Like an Onion

 

25 years ago at Carrigaholt

In the photo above the 'Anna M' is tied alongside my old fishing boat, the 'Whitebank', the ice plant indicates that some fish is being landed, thanks to Finbarr Murphy, recently deceased, God rest him. Ahead is Geoff & Sue Magee's (then) new dolphin-watching boat, the 'Driocht', and as well as the fishing boats there is a new sea-angling boat that I was involved with. I handed on the 'Whitebank' to our son Luke, but after a few years, he felt the fishing was getting too problematic and found easier ways to earn a crust, including his angling boat the 'Clare Dragoon', B&B and beef. 

    My own living, which principally was a matter of taking people dolphin-watching under sail, also involved various efforts like taking Nutan on a cruise to make a photographic book on the 'Islands of Ireland', and Tony Whelan to the Cape Verde Islands with the Irish Whale and Dolphin Group  to research and film breeding humpback whales. All these were exciting and fun, but did not exactly add up to a viable living,- too much of the '60s, not enough '80s, you may say. 

    I also engaged in various other somewhat fruitless activities, such as standing for the Christian Solidarity Party in a general election, and writing a novel that nobody wanted to publish. (I did get some copies of 'Wavedancing' printed myself, and will be giving them away at my forthcoming talk on Wednesday 15th January at 7.30pm in the Sweeney Library, Kilkee.)

    We ended up selling the lovely house we had built beside the sea near the castle, but we bought a cottage in a magical spot overlooking Horsehoe Bay on Sherkin Island in West Cork, where we were able to keep 'Anna M' moored in front of the house, doing sailing trips and B&B. We lived there very happily for 16 years, many of them with no car, and of course eventually found we were in a great place to live through a pandemic. Luckily we were on the pension trip by then,- 'a whole new journey', said the lady in the social welfare office; 'Ay,' says I, 'with a one-way ticket!'  Then this house in Rahona near Carrigaholt, between two sons and their families, came on the market, and it was too good not to take. I have always been advocating living in clachans, and here at last we are doing so!

    I don't fancy myself as a politician, nor hardly as a writer, but the preoccupation has stayed with me all my adult life of pondering how the presence of God, and catholic Christian culture, might be better mediated in our present world. Frankly I underestimated the resilience of the present cultural set-up, with its chronic individualism, consumerism and materialism, but now as I run more or less the last lap of my life, I am hoping that the world may have become more receptive to my way of thinking, and I had better make another effort!

    I have to confess myself at this stage somewhat encouraged by my bizarre but extraordinary contemporary, Donald Trump. Having poured scorn on him as 'the Ducky', I have come to hope that he may succeed in turning some kind of a corner for America, and also for the rest of us, in Europe and the world as a whole. It is very encouraging that he seems to have given up the hankering to try to do so as a one man band, which would indeed set him on a Putinesque path, but also that, with his coterie of lapsed Democrats, he has practically collapsed the now tedious and irrelevent left/ right wing political party thing. Still,  this new beginning cannot be achieved by a handful of men and women any more than by just one man, so his famous 'fight, fight, fight' struck a new and welcome note for myself and I hope many others.

    So what is this corner to be turned? I would rather not over-dramatise, but I did come to Ireland in 1973 somewhat in the spirit of a defeated revolutionary. In the late sixties, I had been at Cambridge University at the height of that cultural and spiritual upheaval that was popularly trivialised into 'flower power' and 'the sexual revolution'. For a time, it had held out hope of collapsing the barriers to human freedom and autonomy, of liberating great potential from the storehouse of our collective subconscious, until it collapsed into the rather miserable seventies, to be followed by the even worse eighties. Mamon ruled, get back to 'reality' and making money!

    Well, what goes round comes round, but now indeed we find ourselves peering into the abyss of war and societal collapse. Making money is only working for an ever-decreasing minority. The inadequacy, not to say impotence or incompetence of governments everywhere is being revealed more and more starkly. At which point, you may be asking what has all this got to do with dolphin-watching under sail?

    For a start, one of the basic tenets of our famous flower power was that whatever one does, let it be fun, but there are other considerations,- for example, instead of getting bogged down on a left wing which claimed to take its stand on social responsibility, or a right wing that champions the individual, we have to find out how to harmonize them both. Dolphins and whales seem pretty good at doing so. They seem to be highly socialized,

even in the case of some whales when they are many miles apart, but also they seem to be the epitome of autonomy. Add to this another theme, that of 'getting back to Nature', or let us say in harmony with Her, and you have enough to be going on with!

   


As for the sailing bit, there is a huge difference between just going places under power as one wills- as a consumer of thrills- and subjecting oneself to Nature's whims, working with the wind and currents, and humbly seeking relationship with nature, and those creatures at the head of the natural pyramid. It is in this spirit that I champion the transition from diesel engine to electric drive, especially when one uses the sails to generate the power for it. Not that there aren't plenty of other reasons which I could expatiate on, and indeed have done in previous blogs. 

    Meanwhile it is a very serious proposition to make a hub for developing and implementing this transition here in the Shannon estuary. I'm all for making jobs and for sound industrial development, and most surely developing our own power supplies is fundamental, but vigilant environmental sensitivity must be in there too, so as to avoid disasters such as that at Aughinish, where they are still busy making alumina for Russia,- a good example of environmental vandalism going hand in hand with health damage and injustice too, as well as hypocrisy!

    The way things are shaping now, we will have a Gannetsway Marine Services Ltd to

Our onions

develop and fit electric drives, and a Gannetsway Sailing Association to administer trips in the 'Anna M' and cooperate with the Marine Services. We might take note of the way the Kerry Group is structured,- the cooperative which it came from is still in there, its members having shares and representation on the Board. Brittany Ferries, initiated and as far as I know still run by a farmers' cooperative, is another inspirational company for me. They have come a long way from the Breton farmers who took their onions over to England on fishing boats after WW2, and whom I recall going round the streets selling them hanging in strings over the handlebars of their bicycles,- I'm still inspired by them!