♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -I always think that things are only made interesting by the people who make them happen.

And to see something as incredible as an enormous construction built on a rock over 100 years previously, to witness that and say, "How did that come about?

Who made that possible?

Who were the people that worked on it?"

It's such a wondrous piece of construction.

Design, sturdiness, craftsmanship.

And it actually is a thing of beauty.

I think it's the finest lighthouse in Ireland.

And it's probably one of the finest lighthouses in the world.

♪♪ ♪♪ If there is to be a father figure in Irish lighthouses, it probably is William Douglass.

He came from a long line of engineers.

His father, Nicholas, was a renowned engineer.

And when William Douglass came to Ireland to take up his position of chief engineer for the Commissioners of Irish Lights, he had about 20 or 30 years experience.

So he wasn't a young man, but he was a very experienced man.

He had learned a form of engineering and design which involved each stone being cut in a particular way so that it would knit in with the stone above it, below it, and the stones on either side.

And it was known as the dovetail toggle.

And I suppose the best analogy is a jigsaw.

Every piece of the jigsaw is different.

Each piece of the jigsaw, each stone has a different role in a different location, in a different place.

And that not until you have that last piece of the jigsaw in place is it complete.

And that's why the construct that is the Fastnet Lighthouse has withstood so many storms because to crack it, you would have to bring down the entire edifice.

And that was an amazing breakthrough in engineering for construction.

His father had put it to use to a certain extent, and William perfected that in the construction of the lighthouse at the Fastnet.

♪♪ ♪♪ The lighthouse involved some 2,000 stones, each individually carved and cut, weighing between 1.75 tons and 3 tons.

All shipped from the quarry in Penryn in Cornwall before it was shipped across to Cork and where it was then examined again.

And Douglass oversaw all of that, and not one rock was faulty.

Every single rock was perfectly cut.

No adjustments needed to be made.

And that is what you see today in the Fastnet Lighthouse.

♪♪ ♪♪ Well, James Kavanagh was an amazing man.

He was a stonemason from Wicklow Town who was appointed by the Commissioners of Irish Lights to be the foreman overseeing the building of the Fastnet.

And he went to the Fastnet, and he stayed there for every single day that construction was taking place.

He had a number of responsibilities.

His job was to get the job done.

His prime role was to take care of the safety of the people working with him.

The conditions would have been extremely difficult on the rock, as one would imagine.

Food rations would have been limited.

Fresh water limited.

And it fell to James Kavanagh to make sure that his men -- and he saw them as his men, his responsibility -- that they would be cared for as best as possible to enable them to be able to carry out a full day's work.

And don't forget, they would have started at 5:00 in the morning and would have kept working until late in the evening.

They worked in all types of weather, so it would have been extremely arduous, extremely dangerous, and they would have built up very healthy appetites during those periods.

They got two shillings and sixpence per day and an extra one shilling for work on the Fastnet, and presumably that one shilling was because of the high-risk work they were involved in.

James Kavanagh oversaw the entire construct, every single stone.

And you can imagine without the engineering machinery of today, it was very, very dangerous work and people had to be extremely careful and safety was of paramount importance.

There was never a fatality on the construction due to James Kavanagh's fastidiousness and care and attention to safety.

And he oversaw every single rock being put in place.

-Over a period of four years, from June 1899 to May 1903, a total of 2,074 granite blocks were landed and set in 118 working days.

And as soon as a temporary light was installed in the new tower, the old tower was dismantled.

♪♪ ♪♪ -Strangely, curiously and sadly, within a matter of weeks of the last rock being put in place in June 1903, Kavanagh took ill, and they got James off the rock for medical attention, and he died four weeks later.

He was 47 years of age.

His body was taken on the Ierne, the boat that was working on the Fastnet, from Cork right around the coast to Wicklow and was one of the largest funerals ever seen in Wicklow Town.

♪♪ -As soon as it came into service in 1904, the Fastnet quickly became one of the world's best-known lighthouses, admired as much for its beauty as it was for its engineering and technological excellence.

In 1925, the inaugural Fastnet Race was held, and it too quickly became established as one of the world's classic yacht races.

Sailors from all over the world compete in the challenging 1,200-kilometer race in which the Fastnet Rock acts as the turning point around which the yachts must sail before heading back to the finishing line.

In 1979, a young man from Dublin took part in the race on board his uncle's yacht, the Sundowner.

♪♪ -Back in 1979, I was a teenager.

I was 19.

I wasn't the youngest.

My brother Nick was 15, which is a remarkably young age to be sailing in an ocean race.

The standards required of people in order to take part in the race were very different then.

Now, you have to have done a certain amount of mileage on the boat, at night.

You have to have done training, safety training and so on.

You have to have safety equipment.

But back then in 1979, you could basically just turn up and it was a little bit like entering the horse in your back field into the Grand National.

So as a result, there were over 300 boats entered, and the top end, there are semiprofessional or even professional crews crewing in races.

There was a championship called the Admiral's Cup, which was a world championship of racing, and there were lots of countries, including Ireland, who had teams in it.

But at the bottom end, there are people who are basically weekend sailors, and an awful lot of people not only hadn't ever done the Fastnet before, but hadn't even done very lengthy overnight passages or long-distance ocean races.

On the start line, there was very little wind but enough but, you know, very little, very easy sailing.

And we had a little -- effectively a transistor radio, and they would have shipping bulletins every six hours or so.

But you've got to remember that in 1979 there was no GPS, certainly not available to people in races like this.

There was no way we could look up and see what weather systems were coming our way.

And I think the weather forecasters now will tell you, but back then, they couldn't forecast more than about six or so hours in advance.

So the Saturday we sailed up towards Land's End.

Again Sunday, it was very benign.

There was fog, so a lot of the wind dropped even more.

And as of Sunday, we had no -- no reason to anticipate that there was trouble coming at that stage.

-On the Sunday, the sea was calm.

It was summertime.

And it was going to be very uneventful.

And on the Monday morning, the first of the yachts started to arrive.

And we were just watching them recording their sail numbers, and sending the numbers -- we'd report them into the Mizen Head by radio.

The lightkeepers on the Mizen Head, then they would contact Cowes on the Isle of Wight, and they would have so many sail numbers and the times of their passing, and all this information was relayed back.

-Well, on Monday, I remember my father was saying that although they were still forecasting for six, possibly going up to force eight, my father was watching the barometer, and the barometer is an instrument which records high pressure and low pressure.

And basically when the barometer falls, the weather gets worse, and the quicker it falls, the worse the weather is going to be.

And this had fallen very, very remarkably low and remarkably quickly, and that told him and told us that there was going to be some very bad weather, even though they hadn't fully grasped this in the weather forecasts.

So it wasn't until, you know, midway through Monday that we realized actually this is going to be a lot worse than we had anticipated or that any of us had seen.

[ Wind howling ] [ Waves crashing ] -As the day progressed, the weather deteriorated and kept deteriorating.

The wind was increasing in strength.

The sea now on the Fastnet was rising higher and higher and higher, and a wave would break high over the rock of the Fastnet so to completely swamp the entire rock and to break just beneath the balcony.

The water then will come cascading down on top of whatever yachts were reasonably close in and they were really struggling hard.

-As it was we were aware that wind was getting up, we were reducing sail because it was becoming more difficult for us to control the boat.

Then we broke our boom, which is part of the main sail, the spar that attaches to the mast.

That snapped in the wind.

And at that stage we were thinking, "Well, we're unlikely to be able to finish this race now."

But we did have what's called an anemometer, which is a thing that reads the wind.

And we were able to work out what the wind was, it was reading, and the wind readings kept going up from 30, 35, 40, 45, 50.

And one of our crew, Brian Matthews, said, he said, "What's the wind?"

And we said, "It's just hit 50."

He said, "Get all the sails off" because we were not going to be able to control the boat.

-Around 3:00 in the morning then, the storm was really at its height.

The wind was up to at least force 10 and the yachts now were finding themselves on top of these waves that might be 30, 40 feet high and falling off them.

And yachts were just capsizing and turning over.

And they were also cartwheeling, bow over stern, into the next coming waves.

-Certainly when you sail at night, it is more disorientating, it's more difficult to realize what's going on.

The waves always look bigger and the wind always feels like it's stronger.

I certainly remember seeing the anemometer reading 72 knots, which is 72 miles an hour.

That's hurricane-force winds.

Seas that would have been the height of a two-story house.

And it's very difficult to control yourself or your boat in that kind of conditions.

Two of our crew were up on deck.

The boat went over on its side, mast into the water, and they were washed out over the side of the boat.

-We could hear yachts coming on the radio and they'd say -- they have one yacht would come and say, "We're after passing an upturned yacht.

No sign of anybody on it."

Another one would cut in and say, "We passed a yacht.

It was upright, but there was nobody there.

We couldn't see anybody on it."

And worse again, was somebody else came in and said, "Yeah, we've passed another yacht and the people are over the side clinging onto it."

-But my uncle, who was also -- fished on trawlers and he said that he had been advised that when trawlermen fished in bad weather, they always had two lines on them in case one didn't work, and they fixed one to either side of the boat.

So we decided to tie a rope around our waist and tie a bowline knot so that in case something happened, you'd have that kind of safety, an additional safety line.

And when the boat capsized, the first guy, Brian Matthews, got back in reasonably quickly.

But the second, John Dunlap, my cousin, was still over the rail, and Brian managed to reach over, grab him by this -- the back and haul him back in and got him back.

But later on, I looked at his safety harness and looked at that catch, and the catch had opened under the force of the sea.

And other people who went overboard were lost because their catch opened and they didn't have -- in other boats, not on ours, mercifully, but on other boats, the catches opened and they were unable to recover them.

[ Wind howling ] [ Helicopter blades whirring ] -It was a total confusion, the whole episode was.

And around 6:00, a massive rescue operation got underway.

The area was vast.

Once this happened, you were looking at around 20,000 square miles of ocean.

So finding someone in it was touch and go.

-On Monday the 13th of August, two days after the race had started, we were scheduled to start from Cork Harbor on a routine patrol of the West Coast.

And once the storm had arrived, we were conscious of the race taking place.

So we said we'd better get back quickly to the race area.

So we turned around and we headed back towards Fastnet Rock.

We arrived off Fastnet Rock about 1:00 in the morning, and almost simultaneously we got the first mayday, which was from the yacht Regardless, and it had lost its rudder.

So they had called out the Baltimore lifeboat, which was on the way.

The lighthouse was quite close by and the loom of the light was illuminating the scene, as it were.

So we turned the ship so that we had the yacht on the leeward side away from the wind as such to give them some shelter.

And that assisted the lifeboat to pass the tow line.

The storm peaked really between 11:00 at night and 6:00 in the morning.

And that's when most of the damage was done to the yachts, that it was very difficult for the rescue services to locate and rescue, carry out rescues, because you had the Dutch destroyer and you had the Royal Navy helicopter from Culdrose helping out.

-Valentia Radio they were known at the time -- they are now Valentia Coast Guard -- were issuing numbers of yachts still missing.

As it happened, we were able to help them with a lot of that because we had recorded a lot of the sail numbers and we were able to say yes, at such a time they passed and they're gone away east or whatever.

-Once Regardless was clear of us, we headed off in a southeasterly course, which was along the track that the yachts would have been steering up from Cowes to see could we locate other yachts.

So a couple of hours later at first light, we came across a yacht that was lying low in the water, no mast, and it was trailing gear over the side, but no sign of a crew.

And we contacted the rescue services and we discovered the crew had been taken off by a French fishing vessel during the night.

But as we watched the yacht 100 yards away, she sank.

Wave came over it and she disappeared.

[ Wave crashes ] -You got to remember, there were no mobile phones.

Nobody knew where we were.

We weren't able to tell anybody where we were.

We could have used our VHF radio except that a wave had come into the cabin during the storm and had wiped out the radio.

So we couldn't tell where -- anybody where we were.

They didn't know where we were.

And all we had was a little transistor radio telling us -- giving us the news.

-Another difficulty arose with some of the yachts didn't have any radios on board, so we couldn't contact them and we had to come up beside them, and nobody visible, sound the siren, much to their shock, I'm sure, and a head might appear and we would just, using hand signals, indicate a thumbs-up or thumbs-down.

So fortunately there were 10 yachts we came across, and they gave a thu-- a reluctant thumbs-up, but they were happy to ride it out.

-And so we took down all the sails.

This is on Monday night.

And instead of heading west towards the Fastnet, we made the decision to turn north and basically to run in front of the wind up the Irish Sea.

I remember my father said, "We'll go to Scotland if we need to, but we are just going to keep going north until eventually this blows through."

But we did have a radio direction finder, which is a little handheld machine which allows you to access the radio signals sent out by various entities.

And one of the institutions that sends out a radio signal was the Tuskar Lighthouse.

[ Morse code beeping ] So remember, our navigator is saying, "I can hear the Tuskar."

And we were getting nearer because the signal was getting stronger.

So we knew that we were heading in the direction of the Tuskar.

And then we picked up the loom, the light of the Tuskar.

And of course, it's -- it was very comforting to see it because it was one of the first landmarks that we saw because remember, we had been out in the western approaches with no land around.

And one of the first landmarks we picked up was the loom, the light of the Tuskar.

And then we knew that we were headed in the direction of Wexford, South East Ireland.

And it's at that stage then that we said, "Right, we'll turn in to Rosslare," and that's what we did.

[ Seagulls crying ] We eventually got into Rosslare early on Wednesday morning, and there were other boats tied up, one of which looked very battered and beaten.

And it had lost somebody.

Somebody had fallen overboard.

And we heard that there were kind of -- well, there seems to be five people missing.

And then it grew to kind of eight, and then 10 and then 12.

And by the end of the race, 15 of the participants in the race had been killed.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ And six people who had been following the race, who had been traveling along in convoy watching the race, had been -- had also been killed.

-It took a couple of days before we heard the numbers of people that were lost.

And it's -- I remember at the time, it's, um -- it's something that will stay with you.

I did feel shocked, horrified and helpless.

You're locked inside in the tower.

The sea is hammering at it.

But nonetheless you know this is where you are.

This is where you're supposed to be.

So all I had to do was do my job.

That's what I was there to do.

We served the mariner.

And, you know, we do what we have to do.

-Of the 302 yachts that started the race, at least 75 capsized, 24 were abandoned, and 5 sank.

Naval vessels, helicopters, lifeboats, fishing boats and other vessels picked up 125 yachtsmen and women.

The 1979 race was never abandoned.

It was won by the American Ted Turner on board his yacht Tenacious.

♪♪ Following the race, a report set out new rules and regulations covering everything from boat design to life jackets.

Debate raged as to how the disaster might have been averted, prompting one participant to write, "If there is a fault in this debate, it is that the factions sometimes say that one tactic or piece of gear is always right, regardless of the boat and the conditions.

There is nothing always about a storm at sea except its danger."

-To a large extent, it was really a huge learning curve for world racing.

There was a lot of lessons going to be learned from this.

-It made you or made us a little more cautious about preparing for races and, for example, wearing things like harnesses.

Now it's mandatory to wear a harness and a life jacket.

Back then, nobody did it.

Certainly nobody did it sailing around Dun Laoghaire Harbor.

But now it's mandatory.

We almost immediately decided we're going to do this again.

We're going to do this race again.

And we did it in 1981, which was the next time it was on.

And it was one of the lightest races imaginable.

There was very little wind.

It never got up to more than about force three.

And we effectively drifted around the Fastnet and we did it.

It's like completing the Grand National.

We've done it.

We didn't win it, but we've done it.

-As the yachtsmen and women who took part in the 1979 Fastnet Race experienced it firsthand, the conditions at sea around Ireland's coast can switch from benign, calm and pleasant to violent, treacherous and deadly within a matter of hours.

♪♪ [ Indistinct conversations, water lapping ] -If you go back to pre-famine Ireland, there was a thriving maritime economy along the western seaboard, the southern seaboard.

Commerce was by sea.

And we're not talking ocean liners here.

We're talking curraghs, we're talking coasters, we're talking basic forms of transport.

Would not be inland because there weren't railways.

The road network wasn't great.

You had to travel by sea.

-The coast was a really busy place.

-It's, in a sense, the lifeblood of the connectivity between where people lived around the island.

It was an intensely settled area.

But if one tried to connect up those places of settlement by going inland, you couldn't get very far quite often, or it was quite slow.

The sea was the most obvious place for easy transport and connection.

The population was huge.

We had a population in mid-19th century of around about 8 million at the time of the Great Famine, over 8 million, and then it crashed, of course, as we went on through the famines.

Early to mid 19th century was a time of of major surveys.

Population surveys like in the 1841 census maps, which you can see the concentration along the west coast of Ireland was distinctly dense right the way from north to south.

And contrast the density there with just as a scale to to Dublin on the East Coast.

Belfast, again, intensely populated, very dense colors, you know, black shading almost.

So you can see that the West Coast was similar even in what are now rural, depopulated, low-density areas.

-So there was a sustainable economy, albeit one that was very, very finely tuned because the famine throws it all out of kilter.

But a sustainable economy living on and in our coastal districts and using the sea and the history of the west coast of Ireland is the history of the sea because that's the way that you travel.

There is no other way at this time to get from Westport to Ballina other than a really bad road network.

You're looking at very, very difficult terrain to get a horse and cart, to get a carriage over.

Far easier to send your goods and services and people by sea.

And it's not just the West Coast I'm looking at.

I'm thinking later on in the the 19th century, you could go from Youghal up the Blackwater River to Fermoy by paddle steamer.

[ Ship horn blares ] -So there are lots of little stopping points, harbors, location points for dropping people off along the coast.

There'd have been lots of small boat traffic and of course, then larger commercial trade as well.

♪♪ ♪♪ The coast was a very busy place and clearly trying to control hazard and reduce the impacts of disaster from accident was the reason we had so much traction to lighthouse and light warning systems, coast guards, lifeboats, and that reflects that intensity of those building phases of lighthouses, and the setting up of institutions reflects that busyness of the coastline, which continued well on into the mid to late 19th century.

♪♪ -While the 19th century for Cork Harbour really seen huge growth, previously the harbor had been noted for its use for either conflict or exploration and so on.

But by the middle of the 19th century, it was all about the movement of people.

Literally millions of people were crossing the Atlantic, and shipping companies in places like Germany, Britain, America were all competing with each other for this business.

♪♪ So, Cork Harbour and its lighthouses would have been in daily, constant, continual use.

[ Waves crashing ] -Roches Point Lighthouse is the only lighthouse marking the narrow entrance to Cork Harbour.

But danger still awaits mariners further inside the bay.

Just north of Spike Island and lying immediately to the east of Haulbowline Island is a large area of mud known as Spit Bank.

At low tide, barely a meter of water covers the bank, which poses a significant hazard.

And so a lighthouse was built here to warn mariners of the danger.

♪♪ ♪♪ -Alexander Mitchell was an extraordinary man who was born in South William Street in Dublin in 1780.

Soon into his education in the Belfast Academy, they discovered that he was beginning to lose his sight.

And by the age of 23, he was completely blind.

When he was at the academy, they had realized that he had a great aptitude for mathematics and he was very innovative in creating machines himself.

So in 1833, he designed and patented what they called a screw pile.

He understood, unlike many, the challenges of building lighthouses in the hostile environment that is the sea and the water.

And as it happens, the screw pile, although used for bridges for the extension of piers and so on, it really comes into its own when you don't have solid rock.

And this was an innovative way to stabilize lighthouses in deep water and on shifting sands.

♪♪ So this is the Spit Bank Lighthouse.

And the way it works is that the piles that are driven down, you can see a central pile going down the center and there are peripheral piles around it.

But each of those piles is over 20 feet long.

At the end of each pile, at the very bottom, you have a screw for all the world like a helical screw that you screw into wood.

Above that then, there's a wide disk that is helical in nature, too.

So what they did was they built a raft.

They had a hole in the middle of the raft.

The pile is sent down and they screw it with a capstan so it screws down and embeds itself into the sand just the same way a screw goes into wood or a corkscrew into a cork, and it gives us a rigidity and a solidity that you wouldn't get unless you were building on rock.

So we're looking at it 170 years later and it's still as solid as it was on day one.

Now, this particular Spit Bank Lighthouse didn't have accommodation on it.

It was a platform on which to house the light.

Although there were lighthouse keepers for it, two full time, one part time, who lived in nearby Queenstown as it was then and later Cove.

The one in Dundalk is very similar in design.

The same technology was used, Mitchell's design, and it looks very similar to this one.

I understand, however, that lighthouse keepers stayed on that one, which must have been very uncomfortable.

-A lot of keepers didn't want Dundalk because there was such a cramped quarters in the lighthouse.

You had two bedrooms, a workroom and a main kitchen, which would be the biggest area.

The bedroom was the width of a bunk and maybe another 12 inches.

It was very cramped quarters, you know, very cramped.

-Everything inside it was tiny, including the door going into the bedroom was round.

There was no space for a straight door.

But the most alarming thing of all was the fog signal.

That was a bell.

A church bell.

-Yeah, the big bell as a fog signal.

It was six strikes every minute.

And it was worked by a clockwork mechanism.

But it was actually within 10 foot of your ear when it was ringing.

-And by the time the fog was cleared, you were fairly worn out.

Dundalk was an extremely small place and a difficult place to live.

You went down there for a week and you were taken off after a week and you got two days off.

My first time under was on Christmas Eve in 1965, and I remember going up to Dundalk on the train and they were all singing and the joys of Christmas.

And here we were, I was heading out to a lighthouse.

Luckily for me, I didn't know where I was going.

It was new to me.

It was known as a two-man station.

Just yourself and one other guy.

So you had to get on with the other guy.

And more so when you were 19 years of age and you were with a fella that was in his late 50s maybe, it was -- the age barrier was there and it was difficult to -- And there was no such thing as television, of course, at that time, and none around there.

There was no generators on that place.

A wind charger for charging the batteries for the communications with the medium frequency radio.

♪♪ The danger of fire, of course, was a serious danger because the whole structure was timber.

You had a light, paraffin light, and your fire.

Coal fire, so there was a possibility of a fire starting there.

-Alexander Mitchell's design was used in Belfast Lough.

A lot of them on the East Coast of the United States, Chesapeake Bay and places like that, on the West Coast as well, Oregon and down along the West Coast.

They were used in India for viaducts and railroads, you know, to anchor viaducts in rivers.

So pretty much all over the world.

It's pretty remarkable when you think of it, that a blind man, you know, born 240 years ago, designed lighthouses like this and innovative means of building bridges and piers.

And they can still be seen all over the world.

You know, he was born in 1780.

We're now in 2021.

And they're still here, still in use, still providing safety of passage for ships and passengers.

It was here when the Lusitania victims were being brought in.

It was there when the Titanic passengers were leaving.

So this lighthouse has stood as a silent witness to many of the significant events in our history and the history of Cork Harbour.

♪♪ -Shifting sandbanks at the mouth of the River Liffey were causing difficulties for ships long before the Spit Bank Lighthouse was built.

A chart from 1693 shows how difficult it must have been for ships to sail into Dublin and not find themselves stranded on the great banks of sand, which appeared at low tide at the mouth of the river.

Between 1716 and 1721, a barrier known as The Piles was built by driving large wooden stakes into the mud and reinforcing them with baskets filled with stones called kishes, and a lightship was moored at the end of this barrier in 1735.

A stone wall was then built between the western end of The Piles and Ringsend.

Meanwhile, storms and woodworm were having a devastating impact on the wooden piles, and the decision was taken to extend the stone wall all the way to the lightship, creating a sea wall 5.4 kilometers long.

Work on the new section of the wall began at the eastern end of The Piles, and in 1764, construction began on the Poolbeg Lighthouse.

Until this point, lighthouses had essentially been braziers on top of towers.

But the Poolbeg lighthouse used candles sheltered within a glass lantern, a significant innovation at the time.

The innovation continued.

Within 20 years, the Poolbeg Lighthouse became one of the first lighthouses in these islands to be lit by oil.

In 1820, the lighthouse was completely rebuilt, and the 200-year-old structure is one of the best-known buildings in the country and certainly one of the most familiar lighthouses.

♪♪ -It's essential for the port to have a lighthouse out here because of the dangers of the bay.

There's another lighthouse at the end of the North Bull Wall, which was built in 1880, and that was automated very, very quickly -- in the 1940s.

And again, the two lighthouses are providing the entrance and signifying to all ships coming in the entrance into the port.

The lighthouse itself is attached then to the south wall.

This wall runs for five kilometers the whole way back into the city.

And today, as it has since 1795, when it was finally completed, it keeps out all the sand from the River Liffey and allows the port to remain open.

Along with another wall that was built in 1820, the North Bull Wall, these two walls caused a scouring effect, and the Liffey, as it comes out into the bay, scours out all the sand and creates a natural channel for the ships.

-With the Poolbeg Lighthouse established and the South Wall complete, the Dublin Ballast Board turned its attention to the docks and quays within the city.

In 1800, the Ballast Board appointed George Halpin as Inspector of Works.

-George Halpin was born in about 1775 and he became a stonecutter in the 1790s, quite probably with James Gandon when the great English architect was building things like the Custom House, the Four Courts and those sort of places.

He is cleaning out his rifle and it goes off and he blows off two of his fingers in 1799.

And ordinarily you might have thought, "Well, that might be the end of his career."

It was just the beginning.

♪♪ He's a young man in his early 20s when he gets a new job as Inspector of Works with the Ballast Board, during which time he did the most amazing thing to Dublin.

He rebuilt Dublin Port.

♪♪ ♪♪ He rebuilds every quay and every wall of the Liffey and by the Custom House, where he probably worked as a young fellow all the way up to Islandbridge to Stoneybatter.

He just completely changes the face of the Docklands.

♪♪ ♪♪ -Where we are at the moment is just in front of the Custom House, and this area in the 1720s would have been a fully tidal, marshy area.

Everything behind me would have been the sea.

On high tide, the sea came up as far as the cricket grounds of Trinity College and almost up as far as O'Connell Street.

That is the main shopping street of Dublin now.

So in many ways, Dublin, throughout its whole history, has been a port city and heavily reliant on bringing in things from around the world onto the River Liffey and then into the city.

The position of the Custom House and moving it eastwards was a statement by the Irish Parliament at the time that the city needed to move eastwards to deal with more and more ships coming into the city and to move away from the Medieval Quarter, which is the area that we associate with Wood Quay and the Vikings, where ships were having difficulty getting up to because ships were getting bigger and bigger.

[ Seagulls crying ] From 1795 to 1820, the port authorities built a series of docks to speed up the unloading of ships.

On a high tide, you bring the ships in and you quickly bring it into the dock through the gates behind me, and that allows you then, once the gates are closed, to unload the ship at leisure rather than racing against the tide.

So they tie in very much with the Custom House, building of docks, building the Custom House, and creating this area that you can bring in more and more ships.

There's a boom, if you like, between 1794 to about 1820 are building these docks.

Regrettably, by the 1830s, though, they're obsolete because ships were getting bigger, because steam ships arrived.

And in many ways, the work on the South Wall, which had happened over the previous 80 years, eventually started to have an impact on the river.

And it starts to get deeper.

And that allows the ships to come in and actually start to use the quay walls that we see around us here today.

-As well as being responsible for the huge improvements to the docks and quays in Dublin, George Halpin was appointed Inspector of Lighthouses in 1810.

Over the next 44 years, George Halpin designed and supervised the construction of more than 50 lighthouses.

♪♪ Very few people have had as much impact on Ireland's landscape as George Halpin.

His buildings have served mariners for 200 years.

They provided a place to live for generations of lighthouse keepers and their families.

And they still dominate the locations in which they were built.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ George Halpin died in July 1854, aged 75, while inspecting a lighthouse somewhere on the south coast.

The lighthouse he was inspecting remains a mystery.

No known image exists of George Halpin, but the lighthouses he created are his legacy.

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