Who does not love the rhythmic assonance of the weather forecasts on RTE radio and the BBC, speaking of rocks we have never seen and huge waves we will never feel? Who does not shudder with pleasure at the safety we enjoy beside the fire while weather forecasters speak of hurricanes bearing in from the west, intoning warnings for Rockall, Malin, Mizzen? The BBC's weather forecasts have an even further reach, to the secret sandshoal that is Dogger Bank, and the bleak mysteries and the vagrant floes of the Faeroe Islands.
When we think of those places, half-forgotten words from sea-poets come to mind - spindrift, spume, bight, clew and royals. Perhaps our uncertainty about those words and their true meaning illustrates the uncertain relationship we have with the sea. No Irish poem about the sea comes immediately to mind, though English poetry is rich in maritime verse, and the English language's debt to maritime experience is huge: leeway, wide berth, in a trice, make way - these everyday expressions, and of course hundreds more, arise from the English encounters with the sea.
Viking raids
The English experience is not the Irish. When the British historian Simon Schama tells us of King Harold's fleet being kept in readiness for weeks to repel Prince William's invasion forces in 1066, we know there is no Irish equivalent of the time. When Ireland dreaded yet more raids by Vikings, no attempt was made to prevent their fleets arriving. While shipbuilding skills grew in England, no such developments occurred here. We remained landbound, physically and culturally, facing the Atlantic with our backs.
In the late 1970s, when Dublin City Councillors were given the choice of naming the new bridge across the Liffey after either the eccentric Matt Talbot or the Irish sailors killed during the second World War trying to feed this country, they plumped enthusiastically for the former. They did this not merely out of deference to the Catholic Church - ah yes, those were the days - but also out of indifference. The sea was mysterious stuff, not for real men: did not the Irish warriors of myth go on cattle raids, whereas not one sailed the sea?
That dire farrago Riders to the Sea notwithstanding, the sea is only marginally part of our culture. Coastguard stations were destroyed across the country in 1922 not just because they were symbolic of British rule (so too were the RDS, the post-boxes and the army base on the Curragh, and all survived) but because they suggested a vigilant relationship with the sea with which we were not entirely comfortable.
The Titanic
The sea was not part of our perception of history. What child in independent Ireland was raised to think of the Titanic as an Irish vessel? How could the most important single ship-sinking in world history since the Ark, the Lusitania's, remain unmemorialised on the Old Head of Kinsale, the last spit of land its victims were to see before drowning? How could the Leinster suffer a similar fate three years later, with no State memorial ever erected to the hundreds who perished on it?
So was it altogether coincidental that Galway Corporation's first major undertaking after independence was the destruction of the Claddagh, the only community in Ireland which in its attachment to the sea and its lore could be compared to the sea-going communities of Le Havre, Plymouth or Cadiz? Who now knows the lamentations which must have swept through the Claddagh in June 1915, as news arrived of the naval catastrophe at Jutland, in which so many men from the region perished in the boiler-rooms of the Queen Mary?
We have a proportionately greater seashore to land-mass than almost any other country in Europe, yet our imagination does not reach out to encompass the sea, nor does it genuinely reach out to those in peril upon it. Perhaps this was the reason why - the RNLI aside - we could for so scandalously neglect our duties for so long over the waters washing our shores.
But in recent years a cadre of dedicated State-employed rescuers emerged, extraordinarily brave men and women who probably do not find the assonance and the rhythm of the weather forecasters remotely enchanting. Our Coast Guard and Air Corps helicopters and our Naval Service hear these places being intoned on the airwaves not as romantic places with exotic names, but as possible appointments with death, as they fish for human life.
Howling winds
They do so invisibly. We usually do not even know their names. Their helicopters fly into the wild maelstrom of the night and set about their business offshore, unseen by any but those whose lives they save. Then they return to their bases to eat, sleep and prepare for the next night's battle with mountainous white waves and howling winds at those sinister conjunctions of sea and stone, Slyne Head and Skerd Rocks, whose very names speak of battered corpses in the spume.
In other countries, these helicopter winchmen and pilots, lifeboatmen and naval volunteers, would have been interviewed within an inch of their lives by the media for the extraordinary courage they have shown recently. Here it is taken for granted. So be it: but when next you hear of seamen seized from the sea, spare a thought for those who did the seizing, and for those at home abed and awake with worry. They have good reason, as we have, to be proud of those they worry about.