Clare Island memoir published

Lighthouse memoir illuminates historic Clare Island’s storied past

Áine Ryan

THERE is a magical green road that traverses Clare Island’s eastern commonage. Its unspoiled contours meander lazily through the cross-millennial layers of this remote land, the only concrete sign of human habitation is the distant lighthouse teetering on the edge of a windswept cliff.   

For anyone fortunate enough to have trod this track, they will immediately empathise with author Jackie O’Grady’s lyricism about its soulful impact when he returned to it on a recent summer’s evening. However, they will need to read his recently-published book, ‘The Green Road to the Lighthouse: Memoirs of Clare Island and the Lighthouse Service’, to understand the poignancy of being your native island’s last lighthouse keeper and, moreover, the person charged with extinguishing its beam forever.

But back to the green road and its sensuous wizardry.  

“That evening on the green road, in the gathering dusk, alone with the memories of my own childhood, and in the disembodied but no less real presences of [daughters] Eily and Grace, half-hearing their conversations as their voices changed from childhood to womanhood, became something of an epiphany for me.”

For over 40 years, acclaimed restaurateur, Jackie Grady, gathered scraps from his past in a special tin box in the kitchen of O’Grady’s Seafood Restaurant in Clifden. He might be in the middle of cracking open crab claws or sampling a cheeky new Chianti when a memory, a vibrant vignette from his island childhood, would rush back, inhabit his being and come to life again.

Eventually, those spirits – rediscovered under the Green Road’s Leic in the suspended stillness of that summer’s evening – would impel the former lighthouse-keeper to set sail into the caverns and coves of his past.  

“To me as a boy, living on an island amongst my fellow islanders was absolutely the norm, and my mainland cousins were the exotic ones. Later, as a young man, the precarious existence of a human limpet, clinging tenaciously to storm-battered rocks on the most exposed coasts of the north Atlantic, or swinging in a bosun’s chair above the raging ocean while being slowly winched up a a sheer cliff-face, like a hooked fish, seemed to me a perfectly rational career, even a desirable one.”

Jackie O’Grady’s oldest memories arise from when he was aged about six and living with his maternal grandparents in the village of Gurteen, overlooking Clew Bay.

Ironically, Gurteen – which then comprised six houses – was a mere mile from his family home at the Quay. But through the eyes of the small boy, it was a world away from that of his father’s, Michael O’Grady, who operated the island’s mail boat and other services with his fleet of small boats.

“In bad weather, my grandmother would closely monitor its plunging, dipping passage until it arrived safely at Roonagh Pier and would attend, with equal diligence, its return voyage back to the island. If the weather deteriorated or if she thought her son-in-law and his crew might be in any danger, Grandmother would rush to fetch the sprig of the Easter palm from behind the picture of the Sacred Heart, take it outdoors and set it alight, no easy task in a high wind, but one that had, nevertheless, to be accomplished for it was a firm island belief that the burning of the Easter palm would help calm storms and ward off danger to those at sea.”

Aged ten, Jackie returned to the Quay and quickly became immersed in the ebb and flow of its busy commercialism. Little did he know that within a decade – March 1951 – he would be reporting to the Lighthouse Services Depot in Dun Laoghaire. It would be the first step in an odyssey bringing him to a litany of rocky outposts around the coast: Slyne Head, the Fastnet Rockabill, Haulbowline, the Old Head of Kinsale, Tory Island.

There has to be a certain irony that ultimately Jackie was posted to Clare Island Lighthouse, a mere two  years before its decommissioning in 1965 – after 159 years service to mariners from every corner of the world.

“As a boy, little did I know that one day it would be my duty as a young ‘keeper to close down the station. I suppose, in a certain way it was fitting that the light be extinguished for the last time by the hand of a man who had lived most of his young life within a few miles of it and whose every night from his earliest memories had been illuminated by its sweeping beam.”

Jackie O’Grady’s memoir provides a eulogy to a traditional way-of-life that, despite its privations and hardships, was rich in cultural contours and humanity. Evoking the innocent and wondrous world of an idyllic but sometimes lonely boyhood, the narrative draws the reader into the intimacy and idealism of coming-of-age on a remote outpost. 

It also weaves a seamless thread to the rich pageant of the author’s adult life as he faced into the eye of his stormy stint as a lighthouse keeper at a rosary of postings around the coastline.

The Green Road to the Lighthouse. Memoirs of Clare Island and the Lighthouse Service’ is on sale in bookshops throughout Mayo, and is priced at €28.