The quietly-implemented and seriously-discounted sale of the sailing ship Lady Ellen has, if anything, further muddied the waters around the concept of Ireland having a national sail training ship. Briefly - but not apparently officially – she was known as the Grace O'Malley, promoted as an initially private venture by the Atlantic Youth Trust to ultimately provide Ireland with a national sail training vessel worthy of the name.
The broad business concept for the project included the expectation that the arrival of such a ship in Irish waters would stimulate substantial national funding through several different government departments and sub-departments, with at least nine mentioned. But this is the 21st Century, and such back-to-front ways of doing things seemed very old hat.
She came, she failed to conquer, she's gone…..For her supporters, the steel-built Lady Ellen offered a possible route towards having an Irish Sail Training Ship.
IDEAL WORLD?
Perhaps in an ideal world, a well-run and popular sail training vessel, capturing the public imagination and its support, would tick many boxes in maritime matters, educational themes, soft power and national promotion, thereby making it an obvious recipient of carefully-monitored public spending under several headings.
But as the generally successful career of the 84ft Jack Tyrrell brigantine Asgard II as Ireland's sail training ship from 1981 until 2008 reminds us, the continuation of such an organised programme was not always an item of enthusiastically-shared government policy.
The Main Man. The great Jack Tyrrell in 1979, with the Asgard II promotional model, and the ship herself finally under construction in Arklow.
On the contrary, it had been a matter of Jack Tyrrell of Arklow – already at what would have been retirement age for an ordinary man, but Jack Tyrrell was no ordinary man – promoting the idea year after year from the early 1970s onwards. And then it was the arrival into positions of power at two separate yet crucial times of two politicians from what we might call the Flamboyant Party – Paddy Donegan of Fine Gael and Charlie Haughey of Fianna Fail – which somehow saw Asgard move from concept through contract and into commission by March 1981.
It was done through their personal determination – ego if you like - despite what was at best lukewarm support from colleagues in both the legislature and the administration. In other words, the other politicians and the directly-involved public service mostly wished it would all go away.
NO VOTES IN SAIL TRAINING
For we should face up to the fact that while Ireland's style of democracy is far from perfect to the point of sometimes being very challenging to maintain, nevertheless it is less imperfect than many others.
Yet it does mean that our politicians, with their reliance on local opinion as it plays out at national level, have long since realised that there are no votes at constituency level to provide significant numbers in favour of sail training.
CIVIL SERVICE – DON'T ROCK THE BOAT
As for our Civil Service, while it does include some truly remarkable people with brains of stratospheric brilliance, their general approach to the matter of boats is that if allowed near, they shouldn't be rocked if at all possible.
Meanwhile back in politics, even in ultra-maritime constituencies like Dun Laoghaire/Rathdown or Cork South, if any election candidate were to prominently list the provision of a National Sail Training Ship as a central plank of their policies, they'd get short shrift.
The Asgard II programme ran successfully year after year - this is her celebratory crew aboard ship in Coruna in 1990 after becoming overall winner of the Tall Ships Race from Plymouth. Photo: Teddie Crosbie
And we should also maybe remember that, despite the Asgard programme running successfully year after year, the Public Service regarded the post of Secretary to Coiste an Asgard as the Siberian placing for career civil servants. It was a lonely job run from a former gate lodge somewhere up in Drumcondra. The Fast Lane it was not.
TENUOUS EXISTENCE
As for the loss of Asgard in the Bay of Biscay to a semi-submerged floating hazard in September 2008, that perfectly illustrated just how tenuous her existence had been. For it occured as the economy was crashing big time. And it was a time, moreover, when the Minister who was responsible for the Asgard programme was an old-style local inner-city politico who had already shown he felt the Asgard was a poisoned chalice. Once she'd sunk – with the €3 million insurance inadequate for a new ship – he discarded Coiste an Asgard pronto.
NAVAL SERVICE'S "WEIRD STATE"
From that, we have to accept that the Establishment's current attitude, in tune with the prevailing national mood, is that a National Sail Training Ship would be an absurdly fanciful and counter-productive project when the housing crisis is a national disgrace, the Health Service is a monster that will always need more money, and our Naval Service is in a weird enough state already without adding a sail training ship to the national maritime responsibilities and requirements.
For even though the operational focus of a Sail Training vessel can be partly season-reflecting, with the programme moved to somewhere like the Canaries each winter, the unpopularity of professional seafaring as an Ireland-located year-round activity is such that we can scarcely put enough crew together for just one of our only semi-ready naval vessels, while the basic crewing for our leading national maritime research ship apparently has to be outsourced internationally.
FORMER RESPECT FOR IRISH SHIPPING
Attitudes have changed with bewildering speed as our society and its affluence and our work thinking have changed with it. Time was when a Cadetship in the Officer Stream of Irish Shipping (1941-1984) was a very respected role, with good prospects. Yet when the Fine Gael government of the time let the company go under in 1984, owing to serious financial maladministration in one of its most distant overseas offices, the many loyal employees adversely affected found it difficult to have their case heard with any real sympathy and understanding.
Once upon a time, there was a company called Irish Shipping Ltd., renowned for the quality of its ships that were named after trees. This was the Irish Cedar
As for fishing communities, always struggling to maintain their quotas in the face of larger vessels from mainland European ports where successfully contending the harshness of working the deep Atlantic fisheries goes back a thousand years and more, the Irish boats' problem these days is that crews often have to be imported.
CHANGED AMBITIONS FOR FISHING FAMILIES
And in leading fishing families, the well-educated younger generations no longer dream of commanding their own fine trawlers, as their fathers and grandfathers did before them. On the contrary, they aspire to be Corporate Lawyers or IT Specialists or property developers. And if they look to the sea, it is as a place for offshore wind harvesting or fish farms or summer recreation.
Asgard II in her days of glory, and they were many
The situation is such that nowadays the greatest number of native Irish sea users in Ireland may well be made up from the recreational sector. And for most of them their interest is a summer involvement, and in good weather summer at that. Yet when the concept of a national sail training ship goes public from time to time, in the responses from social media those fine phrase "maritime nation" and "seafaring heritage" and several other clichés – mainly from the recreationists - soon come top of the bill, with all the airy aspirations that their use implies.
So in these dark days of January, emerging from the galloping effects of our latest ultra-noisy visitor the Horse Lover (for that's how Eowyn translates from Old English), let us take a very fresh look at the highfalutin notion of an Irish National Sail Training Ship.
NEW ZEALAND IDEAL
And let's think the unthinkable, and consider that such days have passed. For sure, we were supportive of the Atlantic Youth Trust in its early days, as it claimed to be based on the New Zealand Spirit of Adventure Trust, which is ultimately a private enterprise sail training venture that has to comply with rigorous New Zealand maritime safety regulations.
The Trust-funded 123ft barquentine Spirit of New Zealand undertakes several roles in addition to sail training, including extensive maritime research.
But then as we learned more of how the AYT was planning on working the cross-border scenario and an increasing number of government departments north and south, it became too much of a tangled network. Would they have to get agreement from each and every one on any move or development they planned to undertake?
MOVING ON FROM HAVING A NATIONAL SAIL TRAINING SHIP
In our modern and continually evolving Ireland, we may well have now moved on from the notion that a Sailing Training Ship should necessarily be a government-supported National Sail Training Ship. Yet in a different direction, over the years there have been a number of larger sailing boats in the offshore racing fleets which in effect have functioned as sail training vessels.
Forty years ago, people were becoming accustomed to having Denis Doyle's wonderful Frers 51 Moonduster setting the pace. But he needed a crew panel of 30 to function smoothly through a very long season, so as his talented original shipmates acquired boats of their own, he found completely new and eminently trainable sailors among willing cadets in the Defence Forces, and continued this programme for twenty years until his last Round Ireland in 2000 and his last Fastnet in 2001.
Moonduster's crewing demands were such that she became a sailing training vessel of sorts
There are other larger yachts which have found themselves fulfilling similar roles out of the necessity of high personnel demand, and find it worthwhile in many ways. And there are several character craft – such as the Conor O'Brien 56ft ketch Ilen - that find themselves into sail training as a by-product of their function as the Sailing Into Wellness ship.
Perfect sailing aboard the 56ft Ilen, another little ship that is meeting sail training needs
QUIETLY GETTING ON WITH IT
Numbers of smaller training ships are gradually building, but it is not in a grand fanfare, "This is our National Sail Training Ship!" sort of way. On the contrary, it is seen through by exceptional but quiet people who get on with it. Those who have done the big ones such as the Round Ireland and Fastnet with the likes of Ronan O Siochru and Conor Totterdell on Irish Offshore Sailing's very well used Sun Fast 37 Desert Star will know that they have made a greater contribution to Irish sail training than some higher profile programmes.
Quiet heroes – Ronan O Siochru and Conor Totterdell of Irish Offshore Sailing have introduced many to successful offshore racing.
But if someone with real resources is keen to promote a private venture trust with traditional sail training, let us hope they get it all securely in place beforehand, rather than as a ship of vague hopes. Good work is best done by stealth. Virtue should be its own reward.
