The proposal that the Naval Service – soon to be the Navy – double its number of ships is welcome news for those alarmed about the historical failure to protect Irish waters. Nobody would be more pleased than John de Courcy Ireland, the campaigner who did his utmost to draw attention to the neglect of our maritime heritage over the course of a long life (1911-2006).
He first crossed the ocean as a young boy, from India, before an unhappy time in a London prep school. However, holidays in Ireland with his grandmother – “an ardent patriot” – were joyful. She instilled in him a strong sense of Irish identity and he later remembered her as “the light of my childhood”. Fascinated by the sea, aged 17 he fled his English public school, Marlborough, to spend the next year as a steward on voyages between Europe and South America – a “far more civilised” experience.
With his wife Betty, de Courcy Ireland visited the Aran Islands in 1938 to improve his Irish and moved to Co Donegal a year later to write a book about the Border. When the war against Hitler’s Germany began, in September 1939, Penguin cancelled his contract, but the de Courcy Irelands decided to remain, in Muff, on the banks of Lough Foyle.
Defending our neutrality during the war finally pushed de Valera’s government into spending the money to establish a marine service, which merely consisted of a fishery patrol vessel, formerly the Helga (used in 1916 to bombard the rebels in the GPO), an armed trawler, and six motor torpedo boats acquired from the British. De Courcy Ireland joined the new local security force and participated in coastal patrols. He found work in the construction of the naval base in nearby Derry, but was fired for his involvement in a workers’ delegation looking for better conditions
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He then moved to Dublin to take up a teaching job at St Patrick’s Cathedral Grammar School. War-time austerity measures led to trade union militants joining the Labour Party and the de Courcy Irelands played their part in helping candidates such as “Big Jim” Larkin to put Fianna Fáil under electoral pressure, albeit briefly.
In March 1943, de Courcy Ireland attracted the attention of the Standard, a right-wing Catholic weekly. Under the headline “Comrade John Ireland”, the anonymous accuser stated that he had written in praise of those “striving to end capitalist darkness around the world”. The weekly also boasted that it had “snooped” on him for four years and observed that this “itinerant politician” had attended Protestant services in Muff. And, it reported, Betty was chairwoman of the Labour Party’s women’s section in Dublin, no less.
This attack concluded with the threat that the Standard hoped “to be able to pursue Comrade Ireland and Mrs Betty Ireland a little further.” De Courcy Ireland defended his “Protestant Irish” background in an unpublished letter to the editor – he was proud to be a member of that “not insignificant minority” that had produced such radical thinkers as Wolfe Tone and Jonathan Swift.
The couple found themselves subject to press attention again, in December 1958, this time as nuclear disarmament campaigners. They were described in an Irish Times profile as a vigorous pair of “do-gooders” who lived in a quiet Dún Laoghaire square of three-storey Victorian houses, in an atmosphere “redolent of the Kingstown past”. The interviewer highlighted de Courcy Ireland’s interest in all things relating to the sea.
“Inside, the first impression is of books: row upon row of them, their range giving a key to the interests of the household. Here is (its owner thinks) the largest private library in Ireland on maritime subjects, running into 13 languages.”
Another “well-thumbed” group consisted of political works, “mostly left-of-centre”.
De Courcy Ireland’s energetic activism included serving as honorary secretary of the Dún Laoghaire lifeboat and joint honorary secretary of the Maritime Institute. He looked forward to the creation of a museum – “for which an entire room of his house already contains the nucleus of exhibits”. The following year, under the institute’s auspices, he played the leading role in establishing the National Maritime Museum. This found a berth, as it were, from 1978 in the former Mariners’ Church in Dún Laoghaire, to which he donated his own vast collection of nautical artefacts and documents.
Ireland and the Irish in Maritime History (1986) is recognised as de Courcy Ireland’s foremost piece of scholarship, which surveyed our marine heritage and the activities of Irish people in the merchant and naval services of other countries. The book studied a subject, he wrote, “positively ignored in this country”. However, words were not enough – he remained an activist.
De Courcy Ireland campaigned against successive proposals for the private development of Dún Laoghaire harbour and the adjoining seafront. In 1988, his skilful approach persuaded the Fianna Fáil taoiseach, CJ Haughey, to suspend the project and order consultation with local interests. His diplomacy, Haughey remarked, proved that there were “still gentlemen about”.
