The Centenary of the Irish Cruising Club will not occur until 2029, but during the past year and more, Commodore Alan Markey and his energetic and effective management team have been guiding and leading this “homeless” sailing organisation in an impressive and efficient high-achieving style that merits special recognition here and now.
The “Sailing Club of the Year” is an informal contest which has been on the go in one form or another since 1979, and since 1986 – 40 years now – it has been under the umbrella of the Frank Keane Motor Group. The contemporary support of the Group’s totally-electric MG Motor marque is particularly appropriate for an award announcement this morning for an organisation whose members’ many activities place a high emphasis on a strong level of environmental awareness and protection. And their mode of voyaging across the high seas and along interesting coastlines is one of the longest-established examples of the regular use of renewable energy.
Alan Markey, Commodore of the Irish Cruising Club. The challenge of smoothly running such a diverse organisation clearly involves periods of serious thought. Photo: ICC
It is the second time the ICC have won the award in the 47 years of this informal competition, having previously taken the title in 1989. But never before has the announcement of the award coincided so precisely with the mood of the moment, and by that moment we mean this very week.
WOMAN SAILORS TRIUMPHANT
For the world of international sailing is currently agog with the news that the previously very macho Rolex Sydney Hobart Race, in its 80th staging, has been won by a woman co-skipper, Jiang Lin of the homely Balmain Sailing Club in the heart of Sydney Harbour.
Admittedly her super-sailor fellow-skipper in the two handed French-built JPK 10.30 Min River was the formidably talented Alexis Loison. But it was Jiang Lin who pulled the whole campaign together, and in the long and often rough hours at sea, was able to match the pace set by her legendary French shipmate.
Then too, let us not forget that for many years one of the most sought-after navigators for this decidedly tricky 628-mile race has been the inspiring Offaly-born Adrienne Cahalan.
Nevertheless the winning of the Hobart race by a woman co-skipper moves everything onto a new plane.
The latest “Sailing Club of the Year” was a world leader in gender equality
But what on earth, you might well ask, has this to do with the Irish Cruising Club?
It’s simple really. Ever since the Club’s formation in Roche’s Hotel in Glengarriff during a founding cruise-in-company by a diverse flotilla of five cruising boats in July 1929, any sort of gender differentiation in the listings of the membership simply hasn’t arisen.
FIRST WOMAN AWARDEE OF PREMIER TROPHY
And it was soon demonstrated that it was an approach which had real meaning. The Club’s premier award, the Faulkner Cup for the best voyaging cruise of the year, was not instituted until 1931. Yet by 1934 it had its first woman awardee, Elizabeth Crimmins of East Ferry on Cork Harbour for a fine cruise made with the 9-ton Tyrrell-built gaff yawl Nirvana of Arklow of 1925 vintage.
TALL SHIPS SAILOR
At much the same time, ICC member Daphne French – a niece of songwriter Percy – was finding her feet afloat, and when the mighty Australia-bound Tall Ship Pamir was briefly in Dublin in 1935, she and a woman friend managed to get themselves signed on as stewardesses. But once the ship was at sea and heading into the long voyage through the Great Southern Ocean, the two of them had proven themselves so skilled aloft that they were in effect an addition to the active on-deck and aloft crew.
The mighty Pamir in Dublin, aboard which Daphne French voyaged as a crewmember to Australia in 1935. Photo courtesy Cormac Lowth
Back in Ireland, Daphne French was the owner-skipper of a 9-ton gaff yawl Embla, and though much of her cruising was done to Scotland, in 1939 she and a woman friend cruised to the Aland Islands in the northern Baltic, the home port of the mighty Eriksson ships like Pamir. The last grain race from Australia to Europe by these wind-jammers had been sailed in 1936 as steam power had become more efficient and economically competitive, but the port Mariehamn in Aland Islands – “where all the old men walked like retired sea captains” as she noted – was a fascinating memory-reviving place.
ALAND ISLANDS
However, the imminence of World War II as the summer of 1939 progressed caused the hasty but successful voyaging of Embla back to Dun Laoghaire, and by the time it was announced by the ICC that Daphne French was the second woman skipper to be awarded the Faulkner Cup, she was involved in war service, commanding a coal-carrying canal barge.
Hostilities over, she returned to Ireland and made her home in the pretty Pamir Cottage in Dunmore East, and downsized to the attractive 4-ton bermudan sloop Dara which had a snug berth in the harbour for many years before its massive re-development as a fishing port.
Daphne French’s little sloop Dara (right centre) in Dunmore East before its all-changing re-development as a major fishing port. A niece of Percy French, she subsequently sold the boat to another ICC member, John Beckett, who was related to Nobel Laureate Sam Beckett
PERCY FRENCH AND SAM BECKETT
Daphne French meanwhile was getting on in years, and sold Dara to the Beckett family of Dun Laoghaire, who were also members of the ICC. It says much about the intriguing ICC membership that within it, a niece of Percy French should sell a boat to an uncle of Sam Beckett, but this was a continuation of the style of membership makeup since the founding of the club.
The founding father, Harry Donegan of Cork, a man of several talents and a back-room power in Irish politics, had been quietly suggesting the idea of such a club since 1912, and a strengthening friendship saw him developing the idea with Billy Mooney, then of Howth, but moving later to Dun Laoghaire in 1943.
In putting together the potential membership, Donegan and Mooney persuaded a notably established sailing figure, Herbert Wright of the Royal Irish YC in Dun Laoghaire, to take on the key role of Commodore. This was to prove particularly effective in many areas of membership recruitment, most notably in Northern Ireland despite some other organisation finding that the newly-introduced partition was leading to a dividing of the ways.
The first Commodore’s Yacht. Herbert Wright 15-ton Espanola (ICC, RCC & RIYC) as sketched by first ICC Hon.Treas. Billy McBride of the Harry Clark Studio. Courtesy ICC
ALL-IRELAND MEMBERSHIP
By contrast, the Irish Cruising Club’s founding membership not only covered the entire country, but included many talents, with the first Honorary Treasurer Billy McBride noted as an artist in the Harry Clarke stained glass studio, while another committee member, Colm O Lochlainn, was a leading Gaelic scholar and printer who founded the highly-regarded Three Candles Press and became a sought-after and frequently honoured lecturer at third-level colleges, as well as being a pioneering broadcaster from RTE’s foundation a hundred years ago.
SAILING DIRECTIONS
Thus although the ICC might find the growth of its activities impaired by the economic hardships of the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s, it still gradually spread its wings to expand the coverage of its detailed Sailing Directions to all coasts of Ireland, such that nowadays – despite the limited encroachment of commercial ventures – the ICC Directions are the standard setter for anyone wishing to make the best of cruising the Irish coast in safety, with extensive local knowledge readily available from the ICC sources when they reach port.
CIRCUMNAVIGATIONS AND OCEAN CROSSINGS
This codification of home coasts knowledge went hand-in-hand with an increasingly rapid expansion of overseas voyaging, and soon round-the-world cruises were being made by ICC boats, while so many Transatlantic voyages were achieved that it was worthwhile for the club to commission a long-tailed Transatlantic Burgee.
Longtime ICC member and Inland Waterways Association of Ireland founder member and waterways author and historian Ruth Heard aboard Rory O’Hanlon’s Arklow-built Tjaldur during a Transatlantic cruise. Photo: Des Barrington
Throughout all this, noted women sailors such as Ruth Heard, Barbara O’Hanlon, Jennifer Guinness and many others continued to play award-winning roles in the club. But it was 2004 before they had another Faulkner Cup, this time for Maire Breathnach of Dungarvan for a round South America cruise – including Cape Horn – with her now-husband Andrew Wilkes in the Swan 42 King of Hearts.
Maire Breathnach on the helm at Cape Horn. She is Honorary Editor of the ICC Annual and is also President-elect of the recently formed Irish Polar Institute.
COMMODORE WITH FATHER ALSO A MEMBER
With this sort of achievement being regularly logged by members, the Irish Cruising Club arrived into the 2025 season in good heart, with Alan Markey of Howth in the role of Commodore in a very special way, as he is the first ICC Commodore to be elected with his father also a member, as Jimmy Markey joined way back in 1984.
There’s something of a Howth emphasis in the top ICC positions at the moment, as the Honorary Secretary Donal Gallagher is also Howth-based with the Oceanis 343 Tara Two, and as Alan Markey with his wife Helen are owner-skippers of the Jeanneau SO36i Altaria berthed nearby, it makes for ease of communication.
ICC Commodore Alan Markey with his Jeanneau SO36 Altaria demonstrating how to make it easy for yourself when Scotland’s brisk sailing weather is squally.
With its widespread membership at home and abroad, the ICC is renowned for its in-club communication, with electronic systems and a website being supported by an excellent profusely-illustrated magazine-style quarterly Newsletter, produced by western Clew Bay-based Rear Commodore Alex Blackwell.
In addition, there’s the pre-Christmas book-sized ICC Annual, full of many logs including those who have received the club’s now very many awards, the results of which will become public after the AGM in Dun Laoghaire on February 20th 2026.
For many cruising club folk, a joint Cruise-in-Company would not be complete without a sunflower raft. This is 2025’s taking shape in July on the West Coast of Scotland. Photo: ICC
ICC ANNUAL IS BOOK SIZE-plus
This remarkable privately-published creation is compiled by Maire Breathnach of Dungarvan, who is also working on the latest ICC history (the third) in order to bring the club’s story up-to-date for its 2029 Centenary. But meanwhile the space she shares with husband Andrew Wilkes is a nest of creativity, as he has taken over the continuous task of editing the ICC Sailing Directions with the challenge of keeping them at the very high standard set for many years by the diligent Norman Kean and Geraldine Hennigan of Courtmacsherry.
ICC IN POLAR INSTITUTE
This breadth of talent and interests over the years is indicated by the fact that ICC members were of significance in the founding of the Inland Waterways Association of Ireland back in 1954, while the newly-formed Irish Polar Institute is also very ICC-oriented with key founding members including the club’s Maire Breathnach, Paddy Barry, Jarlath Cunnane and Rory Casey.
Traditional-style survey ship….Andrew Wilkes and Maeve Breathnach’s majestic Annabel J berthed in Waterford
ROUND IRELAND DETAILS
As an indication of their intentions, in 2025 Maire & Andrew cruised in detail round Ireland with their hefty 54ft hull length steel gaff cutter Annabel J. But in balancing the ICC’s 2025 programme Commodore Alan Markey and Honorary Secretary Donal Gallagher have to think far beyond the Irish coast.
There was an ICC rally in northwest Spain organised by Peter Haden of Ballyvaughan in County Clare, and there was a joint Cruise in Company off the west coast of Scotland and through the Hebrides with a central organising committee whose personnel included the ICC’s all-club fount of energy Barbara Watson, with the Irish Cruising Club contingent joining boats and members of the Cruising Club of America, Scotland’s Clyde Cruising Club, the 1880-founded Royal Cruising Club (the daddy of them all), and the Ocean Cruising Club, founded in 1954 by Humphrey Barton, an ICC member who in 1935 was awarded the Faulkner Cup for a weather-bedeviled Round Ireland Cruise in an ancient cutter.
In addition, in home waters there was a Cruise-in-Company in the southwest from Bantry, while the ICC was responsible for commemorating the Centenary in 2025 of Conor O’Brien’s return from his exactly two-year pioneering “first past the post” circumnavigation with the Baltimore-built 42ft ketch Saoirse south of the great headlands including Cape Horn.
SALLY CUDMORE ORGANISES SAOIRSE CENTENARY
The task of organising this fell to South Coast Rear Commodore Sally Cudmore of Crosshaven. Unfortunately owing to the terminal illness of Fred Kinmonth of Hong Kong and Baltimore, who funded the re-creation of Saoirse by Liam Hegarty and his craftsmen at Oldcourt, the new Saoirse could not take part. But the 56ft trading ketch Ilen, designed by Conor O’Brien and restored to full seaworthiness by the Oldcourt team under the guidance of Gary Mac Mahon of Limerick, is now sailing the seas for the Sailing into Wellness organisation under the command of ICC member James Lyons, and she stepped into the flagship role.
Led by Sally Cudmore, the “O’Brien Flotilla” steadily increased in numbers as it voyaged towards Dun Laoghaire via Kinsale and other ports, then poised in Greystones to arrive spot on at June 20th in Dun Laoghaire when the greeting fleet even fortuitously included a Patrol Boat of the Naval Service and one of Herbert Wright’s earliest yachts.
The concluding Saoirse Centenary Dinner in the Royal Irish YC included around a dozen notably cheerful O’Briens of various relationships to the great man (O’Brien was himself not always “notably cheerful”) and the Centenary was put to bed with a speech by Alan Markey in one of his many functions.
The Ilen is welcomed back to Dublin Bay on June 20th 2025 for the Saoirse Circumnavigation Centenary by the Dublin Bay 21 No 3 Estelle, completely restored in Kilrush Boatyard for the project headed by Fionan de Barrra and Hal Sisk ICC. In a neat twist of history, Estelle was originally built in 1902 for Herbert Wright RIYC, a founding member that year of the Dublin Bay 21 class, and the founding Commodore in 1929 of the Irish Cruising Club. Photo: Afloat.ie/David O’Brien
For although the Saoirse Centenary was done and dusted before June was out, the ICC Commodore was well aware that his members were cruising far and wide between the High Arctic and Africa, they were also positioning themselves for the massive maritime fellowship of the up-coming Cruise-in-Company of the leading clubs in the Hebrides, and indeed such was the variety of the Irish Cruising Club’s activities and achievements in 2025 that they won’t be in clear assessment until the AGM on February 20th.
Nevertheless, we know enough now to announce that the Irish Cruising Club is clearly the MG Motor “Sailing Club of the Year” for 2026.
