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Displaying items by tag: Traditional vessels

Noel Campbell, Assistant Keeper at the National Museum of Country Life in Turlough Park, Castlebar, is leading the development of a boat gallery to preserve the history and culture of Irish traditional vessels.

Turlough Park is about eight miles from Castlebar in County Mayo, where the National Museum, through its Irish Folklife Division, operates the Country Life Museum. This collects and preserves material culture from Ireland’s traditional way of life, of which the maritime sphere is, of course, a major part. It is a fascinating place.

The boat gallery at Castlebar in County Mayo, where the National Museum, through its Irish Folklife Division, operates the Country Life MuseumThe boat gallery at Castlebar in County Mayo, where the National Museum, through its Irish Folklife Division, operates the Country Life Museum

Noel has been telling me how the project is going and how he has been making contact with the owners and users of traditional boats around the Irish coastline.

He has come across great stories about the building and usage of these boats and is also chronicling them in a blog he writes on the NMI’s website: ouririshheritage.org

Published in Tom MacSweeney

Dublin Bay Sailing Club (DBSC) is one of Europe's biggest yacht racing clubs. It has almost sixteen hundred elected members. It presents more than 100 perpetual trophies each season some dating back to 1884. It provides weekly racing for upwards of 360 yachts, ranging from ocean-going forty footers to small dinghies for juniors.

Undaunted by austerity and encircling gloom, Dublin Bay Sailing Club (DBSC), supported by an institutional memory of one hundred and twenty-nine years of racing and having survived two world wars, a civil war and not to mention the nineteen-thirties depression, it continues to present its racing programme year after year as a cherished Dublin sporting institution.

The DBSC formula that, over the years, has worked very well for Dun Laoghaire sailors. As ever DBSC start racing at the end of April and finish at the end of September. The current commodore is Eddie Totterdell of the National Yacht Club.

The character of racing remains broadly the same in recent times, with starts and finishes at Club's two committee boats, one of them DBSC's new flagship, the Freebird. The latter will also service dinghy racing on Tuesdays and Saturdays. Having more in the way of creature comfort than the John T. Biggs, it has enabled the dinghy sub-committee to attract a regular team to manage its races, very much as happened in the case of MacLir and more recently with the Spirit of the Irish. The expectation is that this will raise the quality of dinghy race management, which, operating as it did on a class quota system, had tended to suffer from a lack of continuity.