Richie Fitzgerald: ‘I often hear it said that surfing saved Bundoran’

The house has stood on the main street of Bundoran since the 1880s, but when Richie Fitzgerald looks through the bay window on the second floor, it does not take him long to slip into his 10-year-old skin and conjure the summer shenanigans along the main street in the early 1980s.

The nightclubs, the fights, the traffic, the shouting, the smashed glasses, the morning clean-ups with Jeyes fluid. Or that night the guy landed in through the family’s livingroom window. On a motorbike. And then started boxing the guards. For a 10-year-old boy, the summer town was Narnia with grit: manic energy, a pronounced Republican edge, mad fun, an undercurrent of menace.

And then came winter. The same window faces directly on to Brighton Terrace, up which Fitzgerald would scoot with a surfboard to hit the ocean in six minutes flat. Sometimes he could spend 10 hours in the water with nobody for company. The church spire, McGovern’s American house, later the corner of Waterworld: these became his co-ordinates. He could get into the water in broad daylight and stay there until the street lights had come on and it was becoming dark and he had left himself just 10 minutes to get out of the sea and at the table for dinner.

“This is the Bundoran of yesteryear,” he says now.

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I always tried to put my best foot forward in Bundoran. But we would shoot ourselves in the foot sometimes

“When I grew up here, the connection with the sea was almost gone. It was inward looking. It was from the Atlantic Way in rather than out. So, I almost felt both proud and ashamed. I felt we had this unbelievable thing here in the ocean. I always tried to put my best foot forward in Bundoran. But we would shoot ourselves in the foot sometimes. Visitors would come into the shop around the Twelfth weekend wondering what to do, and you would be sending people out of town to Rossnowlagh or Tullaghan.”

Fitzgerald is one of the great survivors of Irish surfing, self-taught as a child and later, as the century turned, a pioneering figure in the spectacular and highly dangerous pursuit of heavy waves. He and his wife, Briohny, live for most of the year in her native Australia with their children, Ella and Kai. But Bundoran is also home for them.

He recently converted what was his childhood bedroom into an open-plan flat. “Here’s the demarcation line between me and my brother’s room,” he says, pointing to an exposed beam. A vast collection of Star Wars figures is enclosed in a glass case; a memento from childhood at which Briohny shakes her head, it was constructed before she arrived over.

The surf shop below has replaced the original family business: Fitzgerald’s Music Centre. Playing music was the family trade. He is the fifth Richard Fitzgerald. His paternal grandfather was from Killenaule and operated as a fiddle player on both sides of the Atlantic before settling in Bundoran. His father played in a celebrated trad band and so famous faces like Ronnie Drew and Paul Brady were regular visitors to the home. His father, too, plied his trade in the ballrooms of America’s east coast concert havens.

“There,” says Richie, spotting a small black and white photo in a collage of surfing and family shots. It’s a mid-century pose in which his father and uncle are standing alongside Ella Fitzgerald, with whom they played. Music was his father’s language. In Richie, the expression comes through water and words. He speaks fast and with energy and is a wicked mimic.

“It seems incredible to me still,” he says of the fact that surf shops have become as visible a feature in the town as the arcades or the fairground or the gauntlet of pubs.

“I often hear it said that surfing saved Bundoran. I’m not sure that is true. It was quite an upper-class holiday destination originally. Then it went in a different direction. Surfing gave the place something to gravitate towards. I always remember this newspaper had ‘Ireland’s Dirtiest Town’. And at the same time, we had Chris Molloy [the renowned big wave surfer] coming here. That was 1998. There used to be people here who didn’t know Tullan Strand existed. But that’s not the case any more. You could turn on the radio now and hear Ray D’Arcy or someone just casually mention they’d been surfing here for the weekend. I can’t get over that.”

Fitzgerald is related to his neighbour, Brian McEniff, whose mother and Fitzgerald’s grandmother were Begley sisters from Carrickmore. They are clearly the source of a trait both men share: a photographic memory for time and detail. Fitzgerald’s mother, Peggy, died just last month, his father in 2007. Frances, his sister and the eldest of five, passed away at the age of 39 having lived with breast cancer for a decade.

The pandemic lockdown forced him to sit still for a protracted period and in much the same way he took up surfing — instinctively and full-bloodedly — he decided to write his story. He had no publisher and wrote in quick bursts. It was easy for him, even from 17,000km away in Melbourne, to return to the environment of his childhood, which was an unorthodox combination of proper and liberal.

“Mum and Dad were into the teeth brushed and hair combed and all that. I wasn’t allowed to skateboard down the steep hill by the pump house. Or hang around the amusements for too long. But my parents never once saw me surf live. They were hands off that way. Drink was never a big no-no. If we wanted to smoke cigarettes, my mum would say, well, try one. And she was quite loose with the sea. She knew what was going on with the surfing. But there was no skiting you with holy water or anything. She knew it was my thing.”

There’s a passage in the book where Fitzgerald recounts being accidentally left behind from swimming lessons in the pool in the nearby town of Ballyshannon. He was about eight. It was winter. He didn’t have change for a phone box and his parents didn’t operate a come-and-get-me household anyway. There was nothing for it but to walk the three miles, which turns pitch black somewhere past Finner Camp and the graveyard. Few adults take it on, let alone kids. Fitzgerald landed home to find no alarm or search party.

He got through the ordeal by talking to himself, gritting the teeth and cursing. It was a habit he carried through to adulthood and surfing the murderous big waves that became his obsession for a full decade. Late in the book, he describes a day out at Mullaghmore when he became caught under a torrent of 40ft crashing waves and knew he had to wait it out until Gave Davies, with whom he learned how to navigate winter waves, reached him on their jet ski. He fell into the habit of snarling at himself.

“That is exactly the way I operate. That kind of talking to yourself. ‘You asked for this! Deal with it now!’ There is nothing rational when a 40ft wave is about to break in front of you. So, you either lose everything in a panic and drown or else try to front up for it. My ways were fitness. And after that, talking myself into it. ‘F**ken harden up! Get into it. You have done this to yourself. Now get out of it.’”

He doesn’t detail it in the book but that was the one occasion when the water had overwhelmed him: when he got very lucky.

“Yeah. I nearly drowned there. I passed out. But I hadn’t swallowed water in. I taught myself that if you breathe in when you are on the surface, aerated water is very foamy and lacks buoyancy so once you get that water in your lungs you are gone. So, I blacked out. Gabe said he just saw me lying face down in the water. He drove the jet ski out holding on to me.”

That was in the mid-2000s, a couple of years after he met Briohny, who had finished college in Australia and was touring Europe. A friend was working in a restaurant in Bundoran and suggested she swap Austria for the northwest of Ireland.

“It was different,” she laughs.

One day she happened to walk into the surf shop, which the Fitzgerald family set up on a whim in 1990. After they started going out together, she found herself skipping some of the days sitting at the cliff top on Mullaghmore.

I would just say, contact me when you get out, so I know you are alive. Because it is stressful

“I didn’t always come out and watch,” she says now.

“I would just say, contact me when you get out, so I know you are alive. Because it is stressful. There is nothing anyone can do. The beauty of Mullaghmore is that it is such a natural headland that you can watch and see exactly what they are doing. But there is nothing that anyone on that cliff can do in those situations. So, it is scary. And I am glad he doesn’t do it now. It all kind of changed when we got married and they were born [she nods towards Kai and Ella] and his mindset changed. Because now he had responsibilities, it wasn’t just about him any more. Not that it is a selfish thing…”

“No, it is very selfish,” Fitzgerald says.

“But it kind of is, yeah,” Briohny continues, “because you know something could happen quite easily. And then you are leaving us behind so… it is a calculated risk.”

Fitzgerald nods soberly at this and then, to lighten things, breaks into the internal conversations he often had when he was in tight spots in the water, imagining the local conversations — in the broadest south Donegal accent — if the worst happened to him.

“Did you hear about Richie? Jaysus, he drowned yesterday. Surfing Mullaghmore, hey. Jaysus, some idiot. Into 40ft waves! There’s him with two young kids. So, I would build up these conversations.”

He is quick to poke fun at his own vanities and the ego required to become so absorbed in a pursuit as ephemeral as chasing temporary water formations for hour after hour, year after year. The first time he tried surfing, with Frances and his older brother Joe, he hated it.

“Absolutely hated it.”

When it came to writing that day down, it was Briohny who encouraged him to describe the ridiculous, necessary innovation of the family outfits. They wore a combination of dungarees, primitive wetsuits, woolly jumpers and marigold gloves. Dunnes Stores gutties. Hats. “And I thought I was kind of cool.”

Then they’d traipse as a kind of sea carnival.

“I just thought that was great,” Briohny laughs.

“And ridiculous at the same time. Our kids are so spoiled, they have like 10 wetsuits each and they can’t understand how you can’t have had a wetsuit. Because it is not that long ago.”

“Yeah,” Fitzgerald says. “I’m not that old. But Ireland was a different country.”

It was. And Bundoran is a different town now. The rambunctious nightlife still thrives. But it has acquired a year-round reputation as a surfing holiday spot too. Fitzgerald was a key figure in shaping that. The first time he ever saw tow-in surfing, he was sitting on the roof of a house near a break in Hawaii. The epochal figures of the day — Laird Hamilton, Sean Riley, Brock Little — were all out on the water, using ropes and jet skis. Fitzgerald and his friend Dave Blount sat slack jawed. “You are kind of tingly because you knew we had waves like this in Ireland.”

By 1999, he was trying to figure out how to do it. With Gave Davies he chipped in for an old jet-ski bought “from a buck in Sion Mills. It looked like something Crockett and Tubbs would use.” They got a thick rope in the marine centre in Enniskillen. They made a million mistakes as they learned. But there was nobody else trying to tow into waves in Europe at the time. Fitzgerald is a tough judge of his accomplishments, but he is one of the very few Europeans to have surfed the Eddie Aikau Big Wave Invitational contest in Hawaii, and he tirelessly promoted the idea of Bundoran as the viable surf town it is today.

“I think I punch above my weight just through determination and a mindset. I wouldn’t have been any way as good as Fergal [Smith, the Mayo surfer who was among a group to first surf the Aileen’s wave at the Cliffs of Moher] was a few years later. But I feel I did a lot.”

There were strong women in the house. And Frances was the strongest of them all. I think about her every day

The family spends much of the year in Melbourne now but in summer, Bundoran draws them back. Fitzgerald writes wonderfully throughout about the sharp season changes that characterise the town: “Out on the water in the middle of winter, with light offshore winds and thin, frost kissed winter air, you could tell the direction of the wind as soon as fires were lit on the main street.”

These autumn days, he is as happy swimming from the boat quay to the beach with his friend Francis McGloin. They’ll yap about Donegal GAA or music and swim back. Water makes time dissolve. The people in his story are never very far away. And it is Frances, the eldest sister and his protector, who often comes into his mind when he swims.

“She loved the sea. Even when she knew she was sick until she died which was about 10 years. She kept that. She was a driven woman, too. Jumping off Rougey there. And she had that maternal side. There were strong women in the house. And she was the strongest of them all. I think about her every day. Mum died a month ago only. Dad has died. But they had lived their life. Frances though, she died at 39. So, I am 10 years older than she is now. She was a typical Bundoran lass. I don’t know, I would be lying if I said I get a spiritual thing in the water. But I would put on my leash and think of her. Or I would get a blast of water in the face and think, ‘Jesus, Frances would love that.’ Yeah, Frances was the sea person in our family.”

Cold Water Eden by Richie Fitzgerald is published by HarperCollins