This is the text of a speech I gave at the "Alternative Vision for Dun Laoghaire harbour" meeting hosted by Save our Seafront. It was held at the Kingston Hotel on 7th September 2015 at 8pm.
The best things in life are free and walking the East pier in Dun Laoghaire is one of them – a walk to feed your soul. Look out across the waters of the harbour where the World’s oldest one-design dinghies were first imagined in 1886 – the wooden Water Wags still sailed today.
On the upper walkway find the granite structure housing an anemometer with the ancient Greek word ANEMOIS meaning “to the winds” carved into the granite. This is one of the oldest anemometers in the world, first built in 1852. For over 120 years it made a significant contribution to safety at sea by monitoring wind speed and direction. The anemometer was restored by Dun Laoghaire Harbour Company as a millennium project in the year 2000 – with a visual display to provide information for the walking public. A most worthy project for the Harbour Company to have done and I am grateful to them for it.
On the lower walkway, below the anemometer, find Beckett’s words carved into a plaque describing this wind gauge on the pier “…great granite rocks and the foam flying up in the light of the lighthouse and the wind gauge spinning like a propeller clear to me at last…” From Beckett’s play, Krapp’s last tape, this was one of his favorite works: a "nicely sad and sentimental" play about which he felt "as an old hen with her last chick".
John Millington Synge lived in Crosthwaite Park West – just across the park from where I now live up the road. Imagine Synge a hundred years ago looking out across a windswept harbour maybe dreaming of his future play: “Riders to the Sea”. In 1897, Synge was encouraged by his friend and colleague WB Yeats to visit the Aran islands and he spent the summers of 1898 through to 1903 there. While on the Aran island of Inishmaan, Synge heard the story of a man from Inishmaan whose body was washed up on the shore of the island of Donegal, and this inspired his play: Riders to the Sea – a play about a woman Maurya who has lost her husband and five of her sons to the sea.
Yes, a play based on his time in Inismaan on the Aran Islands – but don’t all coastal places resonate for those of us who love the sea? I know my heart is here in Dun Laoghaire but another part of me will always be overlooking another part of the sea, down in Currabinny on the estuary where the Owenabue River flows into Cork harbour, where I grew up half a century ago.
I would say it is incumbent upon us to honour the men who laid those great granite rocks almost two hundred years ago. Let us keep this beautiful Victorian harbour as it was meant to be – a safe haven for regular sized ships; a place of heritage and beauty; a place with uninterrupted views to be shared amongst the people and not sold for short-term profit.
The following is a piece I wrote in 2012 as an entry to the Irish Times competition to describe the best place to live in Ireland. I thought about this piece for days before writing it, the words and phrases swirling in my head. Now, on reflection, I realize that it was around this time that writing was becoming a very necessary way to channel the ferment of ideas exploding in my head. I wanted to be heard.
A chunk of steel-blue sea under endless blue sky is framed by the off-white terraces lining Mellifont Avenue; it draws me down, down to the sea in this town of kings, Kingstown, Dún Laoghaire. The east and west piers reach out in a wide embrace, granite arms of a sleeping giant. Over the pier’s walls Howth hill beckons ending the wide sweeping curve of Dublin bay. Looking back inland the Sugar Loaf is a clear outline, a mini Vesuvius, amidst the undulating hills. Victorian terraces, port structures and a triple of spires – the Mariner’s church, St Michael’s tower that survived the 1896 fire and the Town Hall clock – all jostle for position along the seafront. Open space and urban life in peaceful juxtaposition.
Terrace living for thousands, an exercise in tolerance. Dog barking, baby mewling, piano tinkling, hammer thumping – no matter – live and let live. The daily ‘hi’, ‘how are you?’, ‘grand’, ‘weathers good’ oiling a community spirit not often articulated yet mostly felt; the liberal left-leaning politics of the town emerging when the nation votes: Dún Laoghaire ‘bucking the trend’ or ‘leading the way’ depending on how you look at it. Ann in the flower shop; John in the corner shop with a world wide web of newspapers yellowing in the breeze outside – Le Monde and Die Zeit sitting cheek by jowl alongside the Longford Leader and the Anglo Celt. This is a town where not everyone knows your name but some people do.
Walking. Walking to the DART, to the bus, to buy milk, for a coffee on the seafront, to post a letter, to the library, to the theatre, to the cinema, to the uniform shop, to the hardware store, to the hairdresser – everyone in Dún Laoghaire walks and everyone talks.
I walk the pier in all weathers, once with packed snow right to the end. The icy wind and white cloaked stone set against near-black sea sears a flash of the Baltics onto my brain (St Petersburg for a moment?); six months later a hot summers day: warm honey coloured granite and a salty wind whipping the yachts’ wires clanking against their masts and I am suddenly on a Greek island. Was this what Joyce was thinking over a century ago when he looked out from the martello tower at Sandycove (glimpsed just along the coast)? Was it then that Leopold Bloom was born, destined to spend the16th June wandering Dublin in an echo of Odysseus’s epic journey on the Ionian Sea?
It’s a clear night and once again I walk towards the sea, the pier, my homing point. I tread softly on the footsteps of thousands before me. The lights on Howth hill wink from across the darkness of the bay. Near, yet far. The sea is in my bones; my bones won’t last too long inland. Cities on the sea – San Francisco, San Sebastián, Boston, Barcelona, Nice and Naples – they all whisper to me in Dún Laoghaire.
Alison Hackett
On the upper walkway find the granite structure housing an anemometer with the ancient Greek word ANEMOIS meaning “to the winds” carved into the granite. This is one of the oldest anemometers in the world, first built in 1852. For over 120 years it made a significant contribution to safety at sea by monitoring wind speed and direction. The anemometer was restored by Dun Laoghaire Harbour Company as a millennium project in the year 2000 – with a visual display to provide information for the walking public. A most worthy project for the Harbour Company to have done and I am grateful to them for it.
On the lower walkway, below the anemometer, find Beckett’s words carved into a plaque describing this wind gauge on the pier “…great granite rocks and the foam flying up in the light of the lighthouse and the wind gauge spinning like a propeller clear to me at last…” From Beckett’s play, Krapp’s last tape, this was one of his favorite works: a "nicely sad and sentimental" play about which he felt "as an old hen with her last chick".
John Millington Synge lived in Crosthwaite Park West – just across the park from where I now live up the road. Imagine Synge a hundred years ago looking out across a windswept harbour maybe dreaming of his future play: “Riders to the Sea”. In 1897, Synge was encouraged by his friend and colleague WB Yeats to visit the Aran islands and he spent the summers of 1898 through to 1903 there. While on the Aran island of Inishmaan, Synge heard the story of a man from Inishmaan whose body was washed up on the shore of the island of Donegal, and this inspired his play: Riders to the Sea – a play about a woman Maurya who has lost her husband and five of her sons to the sea.
Yes, a play based on his time in Inismaan on the Aran Islands – but don’t all coastal places resonate for those of us who love the sea? I know my heart is here in Dun Laoghaire but another part of me will always be overlooking another part of the sea, down in Currabinny on the estuary where the Owenabue River flows into Cork harbour, where I grew up half a century ago.
I would say it is incumbent upon us to honour the men who laid those great granite rocks almost two hundred years ago. Let us keep this beautiful Victorian harbour as it was meant to be – a safe haven for regular sized ships; a place of heritage and beauty; a place with uninterrupted views to be shared amongst the people and not sold for short-term profit.
The following is a piece I wrote in 2012 as an entry to the Irish Times competition to describe the best place to live in Ireland. I thought about this piece for days before writing it, the words and phrases swirling in my head. Now, on reflection, I realize that it was around this time that writing was becoming a very necessary way to channel the ferment of ideas exploding in my head. I wanted to be heard.
A chunk of steel-blue sea under endless blue sky is framed by the off-white terraces lining Mellifont Avenue; it draws me down, down to the sea in this town of kings, Kingstown, Dún Laoghaire. The east and west piers reach out in a wide embrace, granite arms of a sleeping giant. Over the pier’s walls Howth hill beckons ending the wide sweeping curve of Dublin bay. Looking back inland the Sugar Loaf is a clear outline, a mini Vesuvius, amidst the undulating hills. Victorian terraces, port structures and a triple of spires – the Mariner’s church, St Michael’s tower that survived the 1896 fire and the Town Hall clock – all jostle for position along the seafront. Open space and urban life in peaceful juxtaposition.
Terrace living for thousands, an exercise in tolerance. Dog barking, baby mewling, piano tinkling, hammer thumping – no matter – live and let live. The daily ‘hi’, ‘how are you?’, ‘grand’, ‘weathers good’ oiling a community spirit not often articulated yet mostly felt; the liberal left-leaning politics of the town emerging when the nation votes: Dún Laoghaire ‘bucking the trend’ or ‘leading the way’ depending on how you look at it. Ann in the flower shop; John in the corner shop with a world wide web of newspapers yellowing in the breeze outside – Le Monde and Die Zeit sitting cheek by jowl alongside the Longford Leader and the Anglo Celt. This is a town where not everyone knows your name but some people do.
Walking. Walking to the DART, to the bus, to buy milk, for a coffee on the seafront, to post a letter, to the library, to the theatre, to the cinema, to the uniform shop, to the hardware store, to the hairdresser – everyone in Dún Laoghaire walks and everyone talks.
I walk the pier in all weathers, once with packed snow right to the end. The icy wind and white cloaked stone set against near-black sea sears a flash of the Baltics onto my brain (St Petersburg for a moment?); six months later a hot summers day: warm honey coloured granite and a salty wind whipping the yachts’ wires clanking against their masts and I am suddenly on a Greek island. Was this what Joyce was thinking over a century ago when he looked out from the martello tower at Sandycove (glimpsed just along the coast)? Was it then that Leopold Bloom was born, destined to spend the16th June wandering Dublin in an echo of Odysseus’s epic journey on the Ionian Sea?
It’s a clear night and once again I walk towards the sea, the pier, my homing point. I tread softly on the footsteps of thousands before me. The lights on Howth hill wink from across the darkness of the bay. Near, yet far. The sea is in my bones; my bones won’t last too long inland. Cities on the sea – San Francisco, San Sebastián, Boston, Barcelona, Nice and Naples – they all whisper to me in Dún Laoghaire.
Alison Hackett