A new book has a 'health check' on the 500 remaining traditional vessels around Galway and found that, while the canvas and wooden curachs are an endangered species, there are efforts to revive and maintain the craft, writes LORNA SIGGINS
THEY were best known as “canoes” or “black beetles”, and they can be traced back to the time of sea god Manannán MacLir. With no keel, and only cowhide and wicker between crew and creation, the curach was an enduring symbol of this island’s coastline.
Pity then that, on the Aran islands at least, the craft should have all but disappeared. For after centuries of survival and evolution, the outlook for the working curach is a little grim.
That's one of the main findings of Glorious Galway: Hookers, Curachs, Lakes and River Boats, which is published on Thursday – coincidentally just over 100 years after the birth of late maritime historian Dr John de Courcy Ireland. As the book states, "the organic bond between Oileáin Árann and its iconic craft . . . is greatly weakened and there is a real danger that it will be lost".
That enduring "image of three men carrying a curach up a beach symbolises the islands for many people", the authors note, and the association is recorded in "great works of literature art and film [such as Robert Flaherty's Man of Aran], in song and folklore".
However, “this sight may be seen no more”, they warn, as the glass-reinforced polyester (GRP) skinned boats that have replaced the curachaí adhmaid or wooden craft, and their precursors of canvas, are so heavy that tractors are required to move them.
The Aran curach had a distinct design with a high bow and heavier construction to cope with Atlantic swells. Acknowledged master builders on Inis Oírr were Mikey an tSiúinéara Ó Conaola and his father, who would travel to the other islands and south to Clare to build a craft in a week. The Ó Conaolas would design boats to suit the crew, and the bottle of holy water in the bow was as important to them as tapered thole pins and oars.
Ruairí Roger Concannon on neighbouring Inis Meáin retained expertise in the traditional working canvas curach, but most of his recent commissions have been for the heavier GRP variety.
Very few curachs are now in use on Inis Mór for inshore fishing, with only four motorised craft on Inis Meáin and two or three on Inis Oírr engaged in lobster and crab fishing. This new audit, carried out by a team from Meitheal Mara in Cork, finds that most of the 22 on the islands are built of GRP and fewer than 25 years old. The sole traditional canvas curach they found was in “very poor condition”.
How can this be? Maritime historians Criostóir MacCarthaigh and Michael McCaughan warned in 2008 in the best-selling Traditional Boats of Ireland of the impact of the then “impending” driftnet ban on salmon. The EU’s highly politicised system of managing stocks in “blue Europe” has taken its toll on other forms of small-boat fishing, as argued by the Donegal Island Fishermen’s group in a joint report signed by 160 European fishing and civil society organisations, presented to the EU Maritime Affairs commissioner Maria Damanaki this week.
However, the flexible nature of the curach’s design is such that it is still used for shellfishing and seaweed harvesting in areas such as south Connemara, the authors note. Until the appearance of the curach adhmaid in the early years of the 20th century, the bád iomartha or “shop boat” for transport and the curach chanbháis were both very prevalent here.
And traditional boat building is also very much alive and well, extending from the curach to the Galway hooker – formerly the “water vans” of Connemara as they transported turf, seaweed, limestone, wood, goods, livestock and passengers. A busy hooker regatta programme has helped to stimulate interest in boat-building and sail-making courses, grant-aided by Údarás na Gaeltachta.
Similarly the appearance of the racing curach at the 1954 Tóstal tourism festival in Salthill has had its impact on the “beetle”. The resulting streamlined curach rása is not as seakind as its older cousins, being designed for calmer inshore regatta waters. Built in batches of four, it is akin to a seahorse with a short but active racing life.
There has to be a strong amphibious gene in Galway blood, for the waterbound county is also divided by the Corrib; its influence on lake-boat design is also explored by the Meitheal Mara team. Once, every house around the lake had at least one punt with its “wineglass” stern, but they have been largely displaced by larger models rowed by pairs, and developed for tourist anglers.
Several families continue the lake-boat building tradition, including the Kinneavys, who date back to Inchagoill island in 1700, and craft bearing the stamp of Mons, Mallon, Philbin and Kavanagh are highly valued among those Galway anglers who “still know the qualities that distinguish a wooden boat from a glass-fibre one”.
And there’s much more, and much diversity, in this extensive medical check of the health or otherwise of more than 500 craft, including Shannon callows clinker punts and cots, oyster flats and yawls, the inshore trawlers and half-deckers and the barges and hire cruisers of the Shannon.
A “treasure to be cherished”, it says, but it warns that the impact of EU fishing measures is “negative and insidious” on coastal communities, who see “no immediately apparent” benefit after new measures are introduced. Boats which can no longer be used rot away, or have to be broken up, and the consequent unemployment in the “linear” coastal constituency is not perceived as a “mass event, like the closure of a factory”, even if the impact on individual lives is the same.
Glorious Galway: Hookers, Curachs, Lake and River Boats by Donal Lynch, Padraic de Bhaldraithe, Catherine Buchanan and Donal MacPolin is published by Meitheal Mara and Galway County Council. €25 (hardback) plus postage. Email mmara@iol.ie or tel: 021-4316813
Back to boat school
IMAGINE young people from Limerick's "regeneration" areas taking the ferry out to the Aran islands to train their counterparts in curach building. Not so hard to imagine if the trend recorded in Glorious Galway continues, and if a new project established in a Limerick warehouse bears fruit.
Billed as Ireland's first third-level college of its type, the Ilen School of Wooden Boat Building has already been welcomed by Minister for Marine Simon Coveney, who paid a recent visit to observe the workspace in the former Krups factory. "Transformational" is how one of the founders, Gary McMahon, describes the initiative.
McMahon and like-minded individuals – including master shipwrights James Madigan of Lissycasey, Co Clare; Jim McInerney of Limerick city; Frank O'Sullivan of Crosshaven, Co Cork; and Liam Hegarty of the Old Court boatyard near Baltimore, Co Cork – believe that there's far more to boat-building skills than building boats.
The training is an "adventure", as McMahon sees it – the "prize" being the "cargo of learning and imagination" acquired en route.
Already, more than 80 students from all backgrounds have enlisted in weekly training, beginning with basic carpentry skills and graduating into boat construction. As its academic director Dr Andrew Hodgers explains, the courses will be accredited by Middlesex University's Irish Centre for Work-based Learning. Links have also been developed with US North West School of Wooden Boat building and Sail Training International.
The school is named after the Ketch Ilen, which McMahon and colleagues have been restoring in Hegarty's boatyard. It was designed by Conor O'Brien, the first Irishman to sail around the world in a small boat. One of the school's mentors, Dr Martin Kay, has also established links with the EU Dorna project, named after the Galician "dorna or single-sail keel boat, which aims to preserve the nautical heritage of the northeast Atlantic. Whereas some European projects see this sort of training as an "end", the Ilen School "sees it as the beginning", he says.
