TD 1
P utting the glass of the IFSC to your left shoul
der and skirting the rim of the River Liffey, take a walk down North Wall Quay, you’ll pass the Famine Memorial and traverse over the long retired, and GRIFT tagged, Scherzer Rolling Bridges and every now and again you’ll notice images of old Dublin coming up for air from where once lay cobbles. The images, in black and white, lie dotted along the Quay by Dublin City Council and depict scenes of a City engaged in and aware of its maritime proximity and of a working river that was once vital to the economic life of the place. In the images, passengers crowd steps down into the river as they wait to board the Liffey Ferry. No handrail to lean on. Boats and ships are moored and boarded as far upriver as Gandon’s Custom House. British Army soldiers with Dublin accents, sailors, children and women of all classes intermingle. The River as a Port. Trade, emigration, war. The Liffey sucked it all in and spat it all back out too, or so it seems from the photographs. In radically changed environments, obsession with authenticity dominates. City Councils chop their mandate into Quarters, grabbing onto threads of the past. Who was here first and who and what belongs more? But Dublin has always been a Port. Forever new. Dublin exists because the Liffey exists. Now though, the Port no longer pushes into the heart of the City. If you squint hard enough from O’Connell Bridge, you can see the cruise ships and tankers far on the horizon. But you’re squinting and as a result not making the connection with the Liffey being part of and essential to this distant Port life. Squinting and not making the connection to the Liffey simply being, being the reason you are here simply being. As the decades have rolled on and the retreat of the Port has taken place we have, as Dubliners, lost our connection with the Liffey as a jumping off point to the wider world. So what of the Liffey now? Deindustrialized and stereotyped as dirty and foul, who is speaking up for Anna Livia today? Embark It’s early Saturday morning in mid September. A week of incessant rain has been acting as a buffer between the high temperatures of summer and the approaching autumn. But today we’re back to summer. The water around Stella Maris Marina is pacific, the stillness only broken by the arrival of the massive Mazarine cargo ship. It turns on a six-pence and docks. In a few days it will sail again for the Port of Zeebrugge, Belgium. No Brexit here or there. Best to circumnavigate where there is. There’s eight of us. Standing on the jetty that juts out into the marina, the blinking lights from the Docks are punching through the hint of mist and help create a Blade Runner-esque type vista. 16 On the road, traffic coughs through the East Link toll-bridge while the Mazarine dominates the docks. The four currachs that lie still in the water awaiting us to embark may seem out of place when compared to the currachs’ usual postcard perfect setting; piloted by rugged Men of Arran and framed by the hills of Connemara. But for 15 years currachs have been rowing out from here in Ringsend and into the City. We get in and push off. Origin Dave Kelly is always the answer. The question being asked is how you got involved. How did you find yourself rowing a currach up the Liffey? From deep in Dublin’s Northside, Dave had been drawn to the siren call of the currach on persistent holidays to Inis Oírr. Watching on for two weeks every summer as islanders threw themselves and their currachs into the deep Atlantic, Dave finally broke and used the only water near to him; the River Liffey. The result has been Draíocht na life, a collective of individuals – only one of whom hails from Connemara – who all found themselves drawn to the Currach and the Liffey. Drawn to the deep idea of the Currach and all the connotations it boils up and the Liffey and how it allows you to be free and at peace in the heart of the City. Dave attests that, in the beginning, if anyone “even looked crooked at the currach, I would ask them would they like to get in.’’ A statement that is backed up by Gerry Doyle’s tale of how his chance meeting with Dave catapulted him into a new world, “I was on my way home from work. I live on the Northside of the City and I was workAbove: Dave Kelly Previous spread, left to right: Eddie Tuthill, Ciarán Healy, Jude McHugh Hugh Mooney, Gerry Doyle Tomás Ó Madaoin Brendan Kielty, Tom Jordan ing on the Southside and I was crossing the Ha’Penny Bridge when I saw Dave Kelly come up the river in his Currach. Flying up in his currach. So I walked around to the boardwalk to watch him as he came up and as he got under the Ha’Penny Bridge he stopped rowing and he started chatting to me and he asked me did I want to get into the currach. There’s a ladder down the side of the wall at the Ha’Penny Bridge so I went down that and into the currach with him and I thought I would be floated up the river like Little Lord Fauntleroy but no, Dave gave me a set of oars and my life jacket and we rowed up to the railway station and that was it. I’ve been rowing ever since.” That was almost a decade ago. For Jude McHugh an encounter with Dave and her transformation into a Liffey currach rower came during the long, dead hours of lockdown. “I got into it from meeting Dave one night in Temple Bar during Covid with my mask on! I had met Dave years ago during a showing of Donal O’Ceilleachair’s film The Camino Voyage and I hadn’t seen him since, then met him by chance during Lockdown walking through Temple Bar and even though I had my mask on he recognised me and we stopped and chatted and he invited me down and since then that’s been it. Before I started rowing, I would have seen the Liffey as just something to go over when going from south-side to north-side on a bus. The only time I’d ever been on it before was on a tour boat after getting a two-for-one Groupon voucher. Before I would have thought of the Liffey as being inaccessible for ordinary people in the City.”