Many tributes have been paid to West Cork fisherman, mariner and seafood entrepreneur Pat Murphy who died recently at the age of 97.
Regarded as a pioneer in fishing and seafood, he was the first skipper to start fishing for shrimp in Berehaven.
A short documentary on YouTube, entitled The Oldest Man In the Sea, captured him hauling up a dredge on his own at the age of 83.
Murphy inherited an entrepreneurial spirit from his father, Willie, who developed a dredge with teeth for scallops which was light enough to be pulled by two men in an era of no engines
Willie also became an exporter, after he made contact with the Brice Brothers, fish merchants in London’s Billingsgate market. He bought scallops from local boats and exported them live by train from Bantry. .
His son Pat was one of a family of four, who left school at the age of 12 to fish with his father. The family had been self-sufficient, living off a small mixed farm in Droum, but the “cash crop” was fish.
Pat attended the local technical school, and signed up to work with the Commissioners of Irish Lights in the mid to late 1940s on the steamships MV Valonia and later the MV Ierne which helped to service the lighthouses in that area
He met his wife Mary Spencer at a local dance. She spent four years working in New York, and the couple married in 1953 after she returned home .
When development of commercial helicopters brought an end to the need for an Irish Lights tender to be based in Castletownbere, Pat returned to fishing in the early 1970s.
Nobody had realised there was any shrimp north of the Fastnet lighthouse.
However, his friend Bill Hurley had experience of fishing shrimps off Baltimore, and both found the best place to fish them was off Bere island.
Pat’s “third career” involved managing the local fishermen’s co-op, where he had been a minority shareholder.
He advocated for a 50-mile limit during EU accession negotiations, he represented salmon drift netting fishermen, he campaigned for development of piers and slipways, and was a founding member of the Beara Action Group.
In 1984, he set up a company with his son, Richard. Shellfish de la Mer, is now one of Ireland’s leading seafood companies, and is the biggest employer on the Beara peninsula.
In an interview with The Southern Star newspaper, he paid tribute to the support provided by his wife, Mary, and family.
Shellfish de la Mer was his pride and joy, and he was still chairman of the board up to last December.
He loved nothing more in the morning to “observe the steam from the cookers of the factory in Dinish, looking out the back window in Blackrock Terrace”, his family say.
His last fishing trip, aged 94, was on September 9th, 2023. After he came ashore, he and Mary devoted their energies to fruit and vegetable growing.
Pat Murphy is survived by his wife Mary, children Gretta, Willie, Pat, Maureen and Richard, 15 grandchildren and 23 great grandchildren.
