One of Europe's leading maritime historians, John de Courcy Ireland, who has died at the age of 94, was a man of many parts: a pacifist, humanist, political activist, linguist, teacher, father, author and a tireless advocate of the need to develop this island's marine resource.
Although decorated by many governments and institutions - in France, Spain, Portugal, Yugoslavia and Britain, to name but a few - he was never offered a Seanad seat as Taoiseach's nominee, which many felt he deserved.
John de Courcy Ireland was born in Lucknow, India, in 1911, the only child of a British army major who died of typhoid after he was sent to China in 1914 as part of an expeditionary force. His mother later told her son that his father's last words to her were "Don't let that boy join the British army".
John was being cared for back in Ireland by his paternal grandmother, from Galway, who was to remain one of the major influences in his life. Even when they moved to Devon, she is said to have imbued a sense of Irishness in her young grandson.
His mother remained in India until after the first World War and returned with a second husband, from the Netherlands. Her son received his early education at Marlborough College and won a history scholarship - the first - to New College, Oxford. However, he was too young to register and decided to pass time by signing on at the age of 17 as a steward on a cargo vessel bound for Argentina. He attributed the decision afterwards to his dislike of his stepfather.
His various experiences during that voyage were to have a lasting impact. He was deeply distressed by poverty he witnessed in Brazil. In one interview he recalled a conversation with a docker where he expressed admiration for a cathedral in the port. The docker took him to his home; the floor was beaten earth, there was no water or electricity and it was within yards of the magnificent edifice.
During his time at university in Oxford, he mingled with socialists, including Michael Foot and GDH Cole. It was there that he also met his wife, Beatrice (Betty) Haigh, from Dún Laoghaire, who was at the time working in a café.
They married when she was 21, although neither of them was in steady employment, and they moved to Manchester. There, they developed their political interests, joining the Labour Party.
On the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, Betty volunteered to go to Barcelona with a medical team in support of the International Brigade. In 1938, the couple decided to return to Ireland. Three years before, during a holiday in Ireland, they had met and stayed with the union leader, Jim Larkin, in Dublin.
However, their first home was in Muff, Co Donegal, near Derry, where John de Courcy Ireland served briefly with the local defence forces and worked on construction of a naval base before being dismissed over his attempts to form a union. He was also to be expelled from the Northern Ireland Labour Party for his part in drawing up a constitution that suggested a federation between North and South.
In a CD recording of his life, released in 2004 by Luke Verling of Earth Productions, he recalled how, when he and Betty were facing penury in Derry and she was preparing a Christmas meal "entirely of potatoes", there was a knock at the door. On the step was the "entire workforce of the Foyle mouth" with a wooden box full of coins and notes.
"It was the most dramatic and moving event of my career," he said, and it enabled him to buy a copy of The Irish Times where he saw an advertisement for his first of many teaching jobs.
That post was at St Patrick's cathedral school in Dublin, where he worked from 1942 to 1949 as senior master. Here he was to inspire pupils including Kenneth Blackmore, former headmaster of Wesley College, Richard Armstrong, who became professor of physics at Tromso university in Norway, the late Prof Rex Cathcart of Queen's University, Belfast, and former Irish Times journalist Arthur Reynolds, founding editor of the Irish Skipper magazine.
He joined the southern branch of the Labour Party and was made secretary of a Dublin "executive" of which Jim Larkin was nominated president in 1943. However, after the expulsion of Owen Sheehy Skeffington, the party initiated what John later described as a "witch-hunt" against him, taking out half-page advertisements which alleged that he and Jim Larkin had been trained in Moscow to burn churches.
From 1949 to 1951, he taught at Drogheda Grammar School. He received a PhD from Dublin University in 1950 for his thesis on the sea in education. He subsequently taught in Bandon Grammar School, Co Cork, and Kingstown Grammar School, Dún Laoghaire, which was then amalgamated with Avoca School, Blackrock, to become Newpark Comprehensive School.
"The sea unites, while land divides" was his constant mantra, according to his former pupils.
During these years, he collected artefacts and historical information for the founding of the National Maritime Museum in Dún Laoghaire. He was also involved from the late 1940s in the Maritime Institute of Ireland as honorary research officer.
He served as voluntary secretary of the Dún Laoghaire lifeboat station for over a quarter of a century and received the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) gold medal plus bar. He was also founder member of the Military History Society and the Inland Waterways Association.
He spoke out for the first time against the Soviet Union during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and was expelled from the Communist Party, of which he was also a member. Other political interests included Irish CND, membership of the Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement and the Bertrand Russell Foundation.
He contested the 1982 general election as a member of Jim Kemmy's Democratic Socialist Party. He once questioned Kemmy on his views on the sea. "I'm a Limerick man," Kemmy said. "I like terra firma - the more the firma, the less the terra."
Subsequently, he supported Democratic Left, which has since merged with the Labour Party, and latterly he joined the Socialist Workers' Party.
The first of many publications was his book on The Sea and the Easter Rising, published in 1966. He is also author of Ireland's Sea Fisheries: A History (1981); Ireland and the Irish in Maritime History (1986); Ireland's Maritime Heritage (1992) and The Admiral from Mayo: a life of William Brown of Foxford, founder of the Argentine Navy (1995).
In 2000, at the age of 89, he published a history of Dún Laoghaire and was commissioned by former marine minister, Dr Michael Woods, to write another work.
He travelled to north Africa to research naval archives on his 90th birthday in 2001 - as always, making a point of travelling by ship. Latterly, he was working on his unpublished memoirs.
He pioneered research on the many Irish who served in foreign navies and merchant lines and lectured on maritime history in more than 20 countries.
He was an accomplished linguist and once remarked that he learned languages to converse with beautiful women in foreign ports.
His wife, Betty died at the age of 88 in December 1999. He is survived by his three children: Hugh, Moneen and Rosamund, seven grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.
de Courcy Ireland, born October 19th, 1911; died April 4th, 2006.