The Coast Guard’s role in combating smuggling and providing famine relief and gruelling night work at sea which was “enough to kill a horse” are recorded in a booklet marking its bicentenary by retired marine radio officer Joe Ryan.
Ryan, who worked in the Irish Coast Guard from 1995 to his retirement in 2014, has put together a commemorative document (downloadable below) that traces the organisation’s history from its establishment by a British act of parliament in January 1822.
He records how its first inspector general, James D’Ombrain, was of Huguenot stock and began construction of station houses in Co Cork. By 1900, there were about 200 stations around the Irish coast, primarily to prevent smuggling but with a secondary lifesaving role.
The many former British navy ratings employed used their gigs and galleys to save lives prior to the establishment of RNLI stations – and often volunteered to crew RNLI lifeboats, he writes. From 1831, when D’Ombrain undertook an annual sail around Ireland, he witnessed the effects of famine on the west coast and was instrumental in organising relief.
This led to clashes with his higher authority which adopted a harsh unforgiving attitude reflected in Seamus Heaney’s work, For the Commander of the Eliza”. Sir Randolph Routh had complained to Sir Charles Trevelyan about D’Ombrain during the 1839 famine and this was the basis of Heaney’s poem, Ryan writes.
The Compass Rose at Kilmore Quay story is on page 20 of Joe Ryan's Bicentenary Booklet downloadable below
Ryan quotes from D’Ombrain’s correspondence with the British government on the issue – “I cannot but feel deeply mortified and grieved at the censure their Lordships have passed on me for an act which I considered at the time to be one of pressing emergency. “
After his retirement, D’Ombrain became a commissioner of the Lighthouse Authority of Ireland- at that time the Corporation for Preserving and Improving the Port of Dublin.
Ryan writes of the loss of the first White Star liner, Tayleur, which was wrecked off Dublin’s Lambay island on January 21st, 1854, with about 200 of the 670 passengers and crew on board surviving; the call up of Coast Guard ratings in Ireland to serve with Britain in the Crimean War from 1854; the transfer of Coast Guard control to the British Admiralty in 1856, with duties ranging from assisting vessels in distress, undertaking navigational duties, recording reports from fishing harbours and identifying wild birds and rare fish washed ashore.
“The Admiralty had an ulterior motive in taking over the Coast Guard. They had a reserve of trained men to call upon in times of war. We can also see how things like their benevolence and lifesaving skills were no longer priorities,” Ryan writes.
The Coast Guard Heli and Howth RNLI in 2007. This story is on page 64 on the bicentenary booklet downloadable below
The death of Captain John McNeill Boyd and five of his crew from the guardship Ajax during an attempted rescue of two ships seeking shelter in Kingstown (Dun Laoghaire) during storms in February 1861; the Fethard lifeboat disaster of February 1914; the establishment of the Coast Life Saving Service after independence in 1922; the initiation of a separate Coast Watch service during the second world war; and the last use of a breeches buoy are covered by Ryan.
He pays tribute to Joan O’Doherty (nee McGinley’s) West Coast Search and Rescue Action Committee of 1988, which highlighted the need for more helicopter rescue bases, and the role of Capt Liam Kirwan, first director of the new Irish Marine Emergency Service from 1993.
Kirwan had worked with Capt Peter Brown and Capt David Shiels on the Coast and Cliff Rescue Service from 1987, and Ryan also recalls the contribution of the late Agnes Walsh who worked for the Department of the Marine during implementation of the Government’s Doherty report on search and rescue.
MV Plassy was wrecked on Inisheer in 1960. The local CCLS team rescued the crew of 11 using breeches buoys. See page 46 in the booklet downloadable below
Incidents such as the loss of all six crew without trace from the Donegal fishing vessel Carrickatine in November 1995; the death of volunteer diver Michael Heffernan during the Belderrig cave rescue in north Mayo in October 1997; the deaths of four Air Corps crew when Rescue 111 crashed off Waterford in July 1999; the extraordinary rescue of a young Spanish crewman wearing no lifejacket from the Skerd Rocks in outer Galway Bay by Rescue 115 from Shannon in 2000; and the rescue of 21 sailors from the Fastnet Yacht Race competitor Rambler in August 2011 are also recalled.
Ryan records the devastating impact of the death of the first Irish Coast Guard volunteer on duty – Caitriona Lucas of Doolin Coast Guard in September 2016 – and the loss of the Rescue 116 helicopter crew of Capt Dara Fitzpatrick, Capt Mark Duffy, and winch team Paul Ormsby and Ciarán Smith off Blackrock island, north Mayo on March 14, 2017.
Ryan spent 12 years at sea on all types of ships working initially for Marconi Marine, before going freelance and spending the final six years directly employed by a supertanker company. He worked as a computer engineer with McDonnell Douglas Information Systems Ltd in Dublin, and joined the Irish Marine Emergency Service in 1995 – renamed as the Irish Coast Guard in 2000.
He retired in 2014, and his booklet is based on research undertaken for a lecture for the Maritime Museum in Dun Laoghaire that same year. His commemorative publication is downloadable below, and copies are also available by contacting him at email [email protected]
