The Inland Waterways Association of Ireland (IWAI) has to be one of the most successful organisations in the country. They have long since achieved their core objective of changing official perceptions to such a degree that the saving, maintenance and improvement of our canal and waterways system are all seen as highly desirable. And more importantly, these hopes and aspirations are not just being recognised – they’re being actively pursued and implemented with across-the-board official support.
But beyond that, the IWAI has developed so many extra functions and services through a nationwide system of active branches, and a healthy central administration, that its current 70th birthday year has seen little enough time devoted to celebrating the significant date in a feast of nostalgia. On the contrary, much of the Association’s energy in 2024 is going into current activity, and future programming.
The inland waterways of Ireland. While the optimum situation for one of our waterways is to be inter-connected with the main national system currently based on the Erne-Shannon-Barrow navigations, the attraction of drawing on the vast experience, services and camaraderie of the Inland Waterways Association of Ireland is such that “isolated” navigations like the Boyne at Drogheda and the Slaney at Wexford have their own branches in full membership with the IWAI.
A VERY SPECIAL PLACE
All this despite the fact that they certainly could wallow sentimentally in the past if they so wished, as a 70th Anniversary waterside garden party last month was held at exactly the place where the IWAI came into being way back in 1954. And that very special place is a formerly quaint building which has now been totally re-built and re-purposed to serve as the IWAI headquarters, the base for its Lough Ree branch, and the station for the Lough Ree RNLI service.
The re-purposing of IWAI’s legacy property on Lough Ree has included the provision for a base for the Lough Ree RNLI.
ROBUST INDEPENDENCE
These days, the IWAI is a robustly independent body with its own ethos of sport and enjoyment afloat and along the shores of the waterways. But in its beginnings it reflected a time when people’s boat interests were less specific, and those involved in its foundation were active in sailing clubs along the rivers and their lakes, while others played a key roles in such growing organisations as the Irish Dinghy Racing Association (founded 1945/46) and the Irish Cruising Club (founded 1929).
THE MAGIC OF AN INTER-CONNECTED SYSTEM
At its height, Ireland’s inland waterways system was a truly nationwide wonder. But the fact that the state of health of the different canals sometimes waxed and waned at different times, or indeed in different eras, meant that it might be pushing it a little to claim that - in some slightly imaginary golden era - it was possible to travel from the Atlantic at Coleraine on the North Coast all the way to Waterford and what we now call the Celtic Sea, or from Belfast or Dublin on the East Coast to Limerick and the Atlantic, with an extensive network taking in all sorts of places in between.
The Rivers Shannon and Barrow provided the main arteries of the the system in the southern two-thirds of the country, with both flowing broadly southward, while in the north, it is the Bann and the Erne which are the key waterways, and they head broadly north. But before anyone tries to read something deeper into these facts, it should be noted that the Erne rises at a source significantly south of the Shannon’s birthplace the Shannon Pot.
Then the Erne heads further southward for some time before the rolling drumlins and hills of Cavan and North Longford re-direct it towards Fermanagh, a county blessed with so many lakes that the locals will tell you that for six months of the year, the lakes are in Fermanagh, but for the other damper month, Fermanagh is in the lakes.
Douglas Heard (left) and Dr Rory O’Hanlon were among those on board when the motor-cruiser Hark made the last complete transit of the Royal Canal in the IWAI foundation year of 1954, before the Royal’s official closure in 1961. They are seen here aboard the latter’s sloop Tjaldur during a Cruising Club of America Cruise-in-Company in Nova Scotia in 1967. The Royal Canal was re-opened in 2010 thanks to the efforts of IWAI, and particularly the work by Dr Ian Bath and the Royal Canal Group. Photo: Desmond Barrington
THREE MAJOR RIVERS HAVE LAKES LIKE INLAND SEAS
Excepting for the Barrow, all the main rivers take in considerable lakes that are effectively inland seas. And yes, I know that most readers will be well aware of all this, but I’m trying to convey some feeling of the sense of frustrated potential for widespread leisure use back in the early 1950s, when inland waterways enthusiasts were forced to watch the increasing dereliction of their beloved canals and navigable rivers as commercial cargo and - once upon a time – passenger use, moved elsewhere for the ready convenience of rail and then road.
Ireland’s inland waterways incorporate lakes which are effectively inland seas – this is a Fireball World Championship under way on the River Shannon’s Lough Derg Photo: Con Murphy
GRAND CANAL A DUBLIN ROADWAY?
In these circumstances, not everyone thought the artificial canals in particular were things of charm and beauty. On the contrary, they were associated with a rough and basic way of life which, when they’d ceased to be commercially viable by the crudest economic metrics, meant that ideas like turning the Grand Canal in Dublin into a super-trench for utility pipes and cables, with a fine road above it, came in for some quite serious consideration.
Fortunately there were those who fought to keep the canals in being, even if it was difficult to persuade a financially-constrained government (something of an Irish speciality at the time) that some sort of glorified ditch, with fancy pleasure boats swanning along it, would somehow play a key role in some townland’s economic revival.
The variety of Ireland’s inland waterways is exceptional – this is a remote canal harbour hidden deep in the countryside…..
….and this is a bit of glitter on the River Shannon in the heart of Athlone
LAST RECORDED PASSAGES WERE BY YACHTS
As it is, it’s of significance that the last recorded passages through doomed waterways were made by yachts of one sort or another. For the working bargemen, going through was all in a day’s work – they didn’t know if it would be the last subsequently romanticised transit. But leisure boaters tended to make a song and dance about it whether it was the last transit or just an inland voyage, resulting at the very least in a lavishly-illustrated album/log recording everything in such flowery detail that - by the time you reach the destination - it’s with the greatest relief, for you no longer can distinguish between the various characters with their Gilbert & Sullivan-inspired nicknames bestowed during the great adventure.
BELFAST LOUGH TO LOUGH ERNE
Thus one of the very few trans-Ulster waterways expeditions from Belfast Lough to Lough Erne via the Lagan Navigation, Lough Neagh, the River Blackwater, the Ulster Canal and then the River Erne itself was made around 1911 by the Belfast Lough group of the Fairy class keelboats from Royal North of Ireland Yacht Club at Cultra, in order to have a Race Week on Lough Erne with their Lough Erne YC sister-ships.
Classic sloops of the Linton Hope-designed Fairy Class racing on Lough Erne. In 1911 their sister-ships from Belfast Lough “voyaged” via the Lagan Navigation, Lough Neagh, the River Blackwater, the Ulster Canal, the River Erne and Lough Erne to race together at Lough Erne YC.
They made the Great Voyage West with such thorough dedication that when they finally reached Lough Erne YC, there was little enough energy for racing on the lake. And unfortunately it’s now so very long ago since I last saw the account of the whole crazy business that I can’t even remember at whose home the log was kept. But the good news is that though the Ulster Canal has been closed many years since, thanks to the IWAI and other pressure groups, it is now in the lengthy process of being re-opened, with the new recently-opened new harbour at Clones a significant step.
FINDING THE AUDAX
In the same broad area, the old Ballinamore-Ballyconnell Canal connecting the Erne system to the Shannon saw the last transit of all made by a yacht, when the Audax from Lough Ree got through - with considerable difficulty - in 1894 or 1864, nobody’s too sure, But as Audax was built in 1859, either is possible. Subsequently Audax came to a surreal end. She lay to a mooring in the bay below Portlick Castle on the east side of Lough Ree, and one winter when she hadn’t been hauled, Lough Ree happened to freeze over, and Audax was neatly sliced along the waterline, and went to the bottom.
It so happened that the late Sean (was he Sean Fitzsimons?) of Athlone’s Sean’s Bar, that perfect model of a very ancient (as in 900AD) urban riverside pub, was to add sub aqua diving to his many aquatic and boating interests. One day his curiosity about the Audax story – by this time considered little better than a myth – led to him organise a dive in Portlick Bay. And lo and behold, there were the remains of Audax in the murky mysterious water, the last boat to transit the old Canal, and a bit of her is now on display - with images and explanatory notes about Audax - in Sean’s Snug in Sean’s Bar in Athlone.
Sean’s Snug in Sean’s Bar in Athlone, with the “bit of the relic” from Audax with images and explanatory notes, plus all the word on the opening of the Shannon-Erne Waterway in 1994.
FIRST NORTHERN PRESIDENT IWAI
The apparent demise of the Ballinamore-Ballyconnell has a happy ending. The first Northern president of the IWAI, John Suitor of Lough Erne (who included all waterways interests as he also raced in the Fairy Class at LEYC), made the revival of the old cross-border canal the central plank of his Presidency. And it has come to pass, though now known as the Shannon-Erne Waterway.
Over towards the east in Northern Ireland, the Newry Canal from Portadown to Newry through County Armagh was the first artificial waterway in Ireland, as the rapid expansion of Dublin from the 16th Century onwards led to a soaring demand for coal to heat the many new fashionably-large houses in the capital. As the best supply was at Coalisland in southeast Tyrone, a waterways system to get the coal to ships waiting in Newry seems to have come into being rather more quickly than many major modern construction projects.
LOUGH NEAGH CRUISER GETS TO STRANGORD LOUGH VIA NEWRY CANAL
Yet by the 1930s, the Newry Canal was scarcely functioning at all, and the last recorded transit was made in 1937 by an auxiliary yacht, the Owen Roe owned (and designed) by Lough Neagh SC’s Philip Bell (father of Fireball ace and noted cruiser Adrian Bell), who was in the process of transferring his keelboat activities from Lough Neagh to Strangford Lough.
But here too the long-defunct canal has its revival enhusiasts, and in the case of the Newry canal they include a remarkable couple, Peter Maxwell and Geraldine Foley, who made a round the world voyage by the southern route in Peter’s own-built steel ketch, but since then have been most conspicuous by their efforts on behalf of of the Newry Branch of the IWAI.
SAILING’S LINKS TO SAVING THE CANALS
Having a Newry Branch well illustrates the all-pervading nature of today’s Inland Waterways Association of Ireland, yet it reminds usm as we give it an extra salute on its 70th anniversary, of the almost quaint way it came about.
Sailing links in Ireland between lake sailors and those on the salt sea went back a long way. And it had been strengthened by the advent of the Shannon One Designs in 1922, and their willingness to get their best boats to Dublin Bay for the Sailing Events in the Tailteann Games of 1924 with the Water Wags., even if it has to be admitted that, despite the sailing being in a rough Dublin Bay, the supposedly salty Wags were bested for the Gold Medal by the slim new craft from the Shannon.
Vincent Delany’s history of the North Shannon Yacht Club tells the story of an organisaion which produced the donor of the International One Ton Cup and the first Commodore of the National Yacht Club.
FIRST COMMODORE OF NATIONAL YC COMES FROM SHANNON
Typical of this river-lake-sea interaction were the Earl of Granard from the shores of the Shannon’s Lough Forbes, who had been donor in 1899 of the International One Ton Cup for sailing races in France. In 1930, he gallantly took on the role of Commodore of the re-born National Yacht Club in Dun Laoghaire when that top position was far from being a hot ticket,
But perhaps most importantly of all for sailing links to waterways saving and development were the Delanys of Longford, a leading medical family whose greatest star was Dr Alf Delany whose interests spread across the Shannon One Designs, the Water Wags, the 1948 Olympics racing the Swallow Class two-hander in the first Irish Olympic Sailing team, and the establishment of the IWAI of which he was a founder member in 1954.
EAST COAST SUPPORTS ATHLONE IDEAS
It came about with East Coast sailing people becoming supportive for the idea of the Association and the cause of the inland waterways through the enthusiasm of Harry Rice of Athlone. Like many Irishmen of his background, he had availed of the possibilities of service with the Indian Army, and returned to Ireland after World War II in the rank of Colonel. But he was determined to have no more militarily-dictated adventures and expeditions to dangerous and remote places as he and his wife Cynthia settled in retirement near Athlone, on the shores of Lough Ree’s Inner Lakes at Coosan Point.
Once upon a time, this was the site of Harry & Cynthia Rice’s unique bungalow Dunrovin in its remarkable gardens, but now – as seen here on 8th June 2024 – it has become the multi-purpose IWAI HQ, still called Dunrovin but much changed for the IWAI 70th Anniversary. Photo: Graham Bartlett
They lived in a highly individual waterside bungalow of sorts at the middle of their superb garden, a bungalow whose rounded roof owed more than a little to some war surplus Nissen Hut. The owners cheerfully embraced popular culture by calling it Dunrovin, for all the world as though it was some very English retirement home in Eastbourne. But highfalutin attitudes to such things didn’t faze the notably hospitable Harry Rice, for when he wrote his memoirs, he titled the book “Thanks For The Memory”. This was the sign-off song for the world-famous American comedian Bob Hope, who is now so long ago that some of you may need Professor Google.
SERIOUS ABOUT SAVING THE WATERWAYS
Behind this light-hearted attitude to life, Harry Rice was deadly serious about preserving Ireland’s inland waterways. So when it was revealed that plans were afoot to decommission the Royal Canal, the more northerly of the two canals connecting Dublin to the River Shannon, a scheme was hatched.
The plan was that Douglas Heard, the founding President of the Irish Dinghy Racing Association in 1946 and a former all-Ireland Champion Helm, would set out in his motor-cruiser Hark (a very ingenious and trend-setting ship’s lifeboat conversion) and push his way westward through the Royal Canal, parts of which were weed-choked, while many of the locks were a dodgy proposition.
He would do this with a determined crew including Professor Vincent “Pompey” Delany, whose life afloat included Shannon sailing and ocean cruising in addition to racing, and Dr Rory O’Hanlon, already a force to be reckoned with on the internationl offshore voyaging and racing scene, together with Ruth Delany (nee Healy and later Heard) who was to become the foremost authority on the history of Irelands inland waterways in addition to being a noted ocean sailor.
LIKE-MINDED ENTHUSIASTS
At the other end of their trans-Ireland voyage, Harry and Cynthia Rice would assemble a group of like-minded enthusiasts whose personal emphasis was on the inland waterways rather then sailing. And with the constantly-battling journey of the Hark (the name was a conflaton of “Heard’s Ark”) warning everyone that the Royal Canal and other waterways would soon close for ever after Hark’s last transit, an inevitably convivial meeting would be held in Dunrovin.
Yet from it they dreamed the serious dream that the Inland Waterways Association of Ireland would come into being, and set itself about the hugely daunting task of raising public awareness and appreciation of Ireland’s heritage of waterways, every one of them a jewel unto itself, yet many of them dismissed as “just another dirty ould canal” by the less visionary of the IWAI members’ fellow Irish citizens.
Official acclaim. John McDonagh, CEO of Waterways Ireland, with Kay Baxter, President of IWAI, with a unique waterways marker installed at Dunrovin to celebrate 70 years of IWAI. Photo: Noel Maitland
ULTIMATELY SUCCESSFUL
There’s no doubting the ultimate success of the idea enunciated in the quaint little lakeside bungalow of Dunrovin more than seventy years ago. So much so, in fact, that it would be superfluous here to try to reel off the achievements and current high levels of many associated activities that are linked directly to the Inland Waterways Association of Ireland, and the spirit of its membership.
INSPIRATIONAL AND BUSY ORGANISATION
Current overall President Kay Baxter, of the Boyle Branch beside Lough Key, heads up a busy organisation which has inspired so many areas where there’s an inland waterway of some sort to establish a local branch.
President Kay Baxter (fourth right) with members of the IWAI Executive at the 70th Anniversary celebration at the dedication of a memorial to deceased members dnated by Thomas & Carmel Meegan. Photo: Noel Maitland
This has reached such a stage that the excellent quarterly journal Inland Waterways News (IWN), edited from Galway by Alison Alderton, carries regular reports from 21 branches all over Ireland. That’s in addition to many other informative articles which indicate, among other things, that the large and eclectic IWAI membership includes some frighteningly brainy people with a remarkably technical frame of mind, who can take on officialdom with confidence when some challenging issue facing the waterways nationally or locally has to be sorted.
TRULY ALL-IRELAND, NOT DUBLIN-CENTRIC
But beyond that, the welcome feature that puts the IWAI and its journal IWN and its wide-ranging website up in a very special and welcome place is that it is not Dublin-centric. It is so NOT Dublin-centric that it’s like a breath of fresh air.
For sure, there’s a Dublin Branch, and they file their reports for IWN just like everyone else. But the Dublin Branch is by no means the largest of all, so in simply browsing with enjoyment through IWN, you find yourself lifted upwards and westwards towards the great inland waterways, to a place and a frame of mind where Dublin is just another port you might visit in your cruiser some day, but there are many other ports whose natural setting is so much more peaceful and beautiful with it.
DUNROVIN RE-BORN
And there in the heart of those heartlands is Dunrovin. Very many years ago, Harry and Cynthia Rice bequeathed their little house to the IWAI, with the stipulation being that it be used only for IWAI and boat-related matters.
For an organisation that was increasingly priding itself on being in the forefront of modern virtual organisations in terms of functioning, freed of the weight of some location-specific base, it was a real challenge.
One of the fascinating aspects of Ireland’s inland waterways is the intriguing variety of motor cruisers to be found there – no two boats in this photo are of the same marque.
VISION, IMAGINATION AND GOODWILL
Yet they have met this challenge with vision, imagination, and the most enormous goodwill towards the special waterside neighbourhood in which the re-born Dunrovin has emerged under the guidance of an IWAI Sub-Committee chaired by Martin Donnelly .
Historically, a very special wheel has come full circle. The Garden Party staged at Dunrovin on June 8th thoroughly deserved to get more than its fair share of last month’s decidedly limited sunshine. And Harry and Cynthia Rice’s legacy provided an ideal setting to celebrate one of Ireland’s most successful organisations.
TOWARDS A HEALTHIER IRELAND
The presence of no less seven former IWAI Presidents, together with John McDonagh, the CEO of Waterways Ireland, the Statutory Body for our navigable lakes, river and canals, set the right mood to honour an idea whose time did indeed come. And it is more active than ever, as the waterways network expands its activities to help us all towards a healthier Ireland with the blueways and greenways of the canals and rivers now seen – and rightly so – as a major asset. We all owe a great debut of gratitude to the IWAI.
New horizons. Among the many sub-groups within the IWAI is a dedicated Cruising Group that makes forays seaward – they are seen here in formation revelling in the wide open spaces of the Shannon Estuary. Photo: Noel von Froggenstein
