Dr Joan O’Doherty, who spearheaded the campaign to improve search and rescue services on the west coast in the late 1980s, is keynote speaker at the Irish Ocean Literacy Network (IOLN) regional community event in Derry on Friday, 20 November.
The Foyle event will be the culmination and synthesis of the Shared Island and Ocean project, which the IOLN has been hosting with Queen’s University Belfast (QUB).
It aims to bring together findings from regional community events held in Anagaire, Portaferry, Strandhill, Ballycastle and Tramore, supported by the Shared Island Fund.
The IOLN says the programme will be shaped by themes and perspectives raised through those conversations, with community knowledge and lived experience informing the discussion alongside research, policy and organisational perspectives.
The event will focus on key recurring themes from the regional community events, including:
Marine Identity: Our links with the ocean have long shaped coastal identities, landscapes, livelihoods, recreation and a shared sense of place. Discussion will include fishing and coastal livelihoods, language and place names, traditional and intergenerational knowledge, changing recreational connections, and questions of access and belonging in coastal communities.
Caring for Our Coastal Environment: As the climate changes, economic uses of the ocean multiply and access can become more contested, coastal communities face difficult questions about how to safeguard the marine environment.
It will discuss the ocean’s contribution to health and wellbeing, environmental stewardship, and what individuals, communities, organisations and policymakers can do. Differing perspectives, including on offshore renewable energy and coastal communities, should have space in an open and respectful discussion.
The Foyle gathering will bring these conversations together in a cross-border setting and will make the Shared Island dimension explicit by exploring connections across communities on both sides of the border, opportunities for collaboration and common ground, and practical ideas and recommendations for the future, the IOLN says.
The event at the Da Vinci Hotel, Derry, will open with registration from 10am. Dr Micheál Ó Cinnéide will give a short, factual overview of themes emerging across the regional events, and Dr O’Doherty’s “keynote conversation” with journalist Lorna Siggins starts at 10.45am.
Dr O’Doherty grew up in Derry and qualified as a community development worker in 1973.
She married a science teacher who became a fisherman and moved to live in Teelin, southwest Donegal.
In 1988, she initiated and then chaired the West Coast Search and Rescue Committee, which received all of its demands within 18 months. Her role in the campaign is also recalled in Afloat’s account of an early west coast helicopter rescue. She then completed a master’s degree in rural development and published the book Ireland’s Fishery Policy?
She completed a PhD on The Sea Tenure of Donegal Pre and Post EU Membership 1950–1997: A Historical and Sustainable Fishery Perspective in 1999. She later worked on a number of EU projects and edited academic papers on fishery matters.
Conversations on Marine Identity will follow, moderated by Dr Lindsey West, with contributors including Kate Burns, Duane Fitzsimmons and Ciarán Ó Driscoll.
Sarah Walmsley and the Hive Choir will perform over lunch, and the afternoon session on Caring for Our Coastal Environment will be moderated by Dr Aoife Ní Lochlainn of the Irish Environment Pillar.
Participants in the discussion will include Kathy Donaghy (journalist and broadcaster, Inishowen); Dr Robert Wilkes (formerly of the EPA, biodiversity and habitat pressures); William McElhinney (Heritage in Schools, education and community perspective); and Jade Berman (Northern Ireland Marine and Coastal Specialist for the National Trust).
The closing plenary and wrap-up discussion from 3.30pm to 4pm will be moderated by Heidi McIlvenny of IOLN/QUB.
Further details and registration for the free event are available on the IOLN website.
