♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -Much of Ireland's coastline is rugged and treacherous.

In a storm, there are few places to shelter and almost no chances of surviving a shipwreck.

As maritime trade grew rapidly in the 19th century and as ships became larger and faster, lighthouses were built in some of the most remote and hazardous locations around the coast.

-The causes of ships sinking around Ireland are myriad, but particularly in in the early years of commerce, it will be the ships hitting the coast.

They simply are uncertain of where they are and don't realize where they are until they're too late.

-And we've recorded 18,000 incidences of wrecking events off the coast of Ireland.

The majority of those wrecks date to the 19th century, when shipping was at its highest levels off the coast of Ireland.

So very often these ships ended up sinking on Irish Coast by accident, whether hitting a sandbank in the middle of the night, going ashore because of poor navigation, going ashore because there wasn't lighthouses in place at the time or poor visibility where they couldn't even see the lighthouses.

-Even then, when they do see the coast, they don't necessarily know exactly where they are, particularly having come across the Atlantic.

It's one thing if you're coasting, sort of going headland to headland as you move along the coast of Ireland.

But if you suddenly arrived, you see a coastline ahead and you don't know where you are.

you don't know the hidden dangers.

-Of the 18,000 or so shipwrecks we have in our database, most of these we've sourced from documentary sources, but it doesn't necessarily mean we have a location for the wreck.

And thus far, we've only located approximately 4,000 actual wrecks on the seabed.

We also cooperate closely with the Seabed Survey or the INFOMAR project, and they've located over 400 shipwrecks thus far.

So we've been running a project with them, trying to match our historical records with the physical wreck remains that they map on the seabed.

♪♪ -The INFOMAR program was started in 2006 to survey the coastal waters up to a depth of 200 meters.

The Marine Institute's ships, the RV Celtic Explorer and the RV Celtic Voyager surveyed the deeper areas.

While the shallower areas less than 20 meters deep are surveyed by the Geological Survey of Ireland's vessels, the RV Geo and the RV Kerry.

♪♪ -One of the key features we've been seeing on our seabed data as we've been undertaking this large scale mapping are shipwrecks.

We get really accurate, detailed maps of these valuable heritage assets.

One of the interesting shipwrecks we've mapped is the Queen Victoria.

She grounded on the rocks just below the Baily Lighthouse at Howth Head.

She went into a snowstorm, didn't slow down due to reduced visibility, and ended up on the rocks.

-But the captain of the palace steamer, Captain Church, decided to try and pull the ship back and try and make it into shore, which would be the logical thing to do.

However, he was unaware at the time that when they hit the rocks below the lighthouse, that it had pierced the hold of the hold of the ship, and as he pulled back, the belly of the ship kind of ripped off the paddle steamer, and the paddle steamer sank within minutes, only 230 meters away from the lighthouse.

-Not knowing the exact position of their ships, led many captains to make fatal decisions, and the need for accurate charts became urgent.

-Historically in the 1800s, charting was undertaken at sea by lead line.

So effectively a rope with a weight and tire attached to the bottom of that.

They would drop it over the side of the vessel, measure how many fathoms it was, and reel that manually back in.

-Those were soundings that were being taken at depths of thousands of meters so there was a poor misfortunate dropping a line with a lead weight forever down to the seabed and bringing it back up, but getting quite accurate measurements where they went.

-But it was over quite a substantial area.

But it really opened people's eyes to the fact that the sea was deeper, broader, and a lot more variety in the ocean than had been thought before then.

-As well as mapping Ireland's offshore territory, INFOMAR is responsible for the immensely detailed mapping of the entire coastline of Ireland.

And today, the Celtic voyager is surveying an area of the south west coast between the Beara and the Iveragh peninsulas known as the Kenmare River.

-This area hasn't really been systematically surveyed except by a single beam in the 1960s.

And prior to that, it would have all been done by the old lead lines that they'd dropped down to the seabed and actually measure the depth one point at a time.

-During the early 1900s, we moved from using lead line depth soundings to using sound energy to measure the water depth.

We use single beam echo sounder to transmit sound energy through the water column to measure the time it takes to bounce off the seabed and return.

Modern systems have significantly evolved.

Today, the systems we used on the vessel were typically acquiring 500 plus depth measurements left and right of the vessel in a sweep about 75 degrees either side as the ship moves forward.

And that allows us every 10th of a second to just build up a really, really accurate 3-D terrain model of the seabed.

-In those days, they would have picked up pretty much everything along the line that they traveled.

However, in between the lines that they traveled, there would still be a few uncharted shoals, and those are the ones that we are aiming to to find now.

Okay, this is a very old chart of the UK and Ireland.

This is dated around about the middle of the 17th century, and you can see there's only a very few depths that are actually put on to the charts at that time.

Just move on to a more detailed chart of Kenmare, where we're surveying at the moment.

You can see here how the coastline has been very well defined, but again, the soundings are very sparse.

So this one was dated 1749, and it wasn't then until the sort of mid 1800s when the great Irish hydrographer Francis Beaufort was in charge of the UK Hydrographic Office, that the soundings are all through the charting area, and a lot more effort was put in, and the Royal Navy would have been holed up here in Kenmare River for months and months on end with hundreds and hundreds of people working away at it.

-Francis Beaufort is one of those Irishmen who we really should know a lot more about.

He's an extraordinary man.

Born outside Navan, a place called Flower Hill, in 1775, and Francis's father, Daniel Beaufort, he was the rector in Navan, but also pioneers the one mile to six inch map, which is a revolutionary map in the early 1790s that changes mapping.

So this is going to become a big part of Francis Beaufort's life.

So he went to a military and naval academy in Dublin, but he got his best training in Trinity College when he studied for five months, only five months under Dr. Henry Usher, who was the professor of astronomy.

Really imaginative individual.

He learned a lot.

He was up at the Dunsink Observatory, learning about how the stars and the moon controlled the tides and all the rest of it.

In 1789, he's only 14, and he leaves Dr.

Usher's Observatory, and he goes on his first voyage.

It's a surveying expedition to Indonesia.

And there is a shipwreck.

The ship is wrecked while he's out there, and he very nearly loses his life.

And the reason for the shipwreck was down to bad mapping.

And he said, "Ah, without a good map, we're all in danger."

And that really is the moment when he started thinking, "How can we get better maps?"

♪♪ When he's a young man, he transfers to the Royal Navy and he conducts his first survey in 1807, and he takes a ship down the Rio de la Plata in South America, surveying the coastline, does a really good job, and they say, "Well, would you take on a bit more coast?"

And they send him down to Turkey, and he does the Ottoman Empire as it was there and produces these incredible maps that were still being used right through to the 1960s and 1970s.

They were vital during the Gallipoli campaign in the First World War.

With that very slow rise through the ranks, he finally becomes Chief Hydrographer to the Royal Navy, to the Admiralty, when he is 55 years old and he's going to be in charge of it for the next 26 years, during which time he revolutionizes the Hydrography department, getting a deep understanding of Britain's maritime empire.

But it wasn't just Britain's empire.

He was collaborating with the heads of states and naval departments in other countries, in France, in Italy, in the United States of America, producing really a global concept of what our oceans were all about.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -In 1996, Ireland ratified the United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea.

This convention governs international marine law, and it recognized the need to designate marine territory.

-There was scientific argument built into the convention which allowed you to make a case to extend your territory, and Ireland has been very successful in doing that.

We had to map our marine territory in order to lay the foundation for the argument to do this.

And this has been ongoing since 1997.

One of the outcomes of our signing up to UNCLOS was the dramatic increase in our territory.

We've used this concept of the real map of Ireland to explain to people what actually is Ireland's marine territory.

It's now enshrined in the geography schoolbooks of our primary school children that they see Ireland not as the island as it was thought to be to us when we were in school, but this large marine territory roughly 10 times the area of Ireland.

-The importance of UNCLOS for Ireland is that Ireland went from being one of the smallest territorial countries in Europe to becoming one of the largest countries in Europe.

And that has great implications for Ireland economically, politically, and financially, as well.

-The topography offshore is extremely complex, and it's no different to what we see on land, except it's a submerged version of it.

Seabed terrain is extremely complex, particularly around the headlands off the west of Ireland, where our lighthouses are based.

We're just here off the southwest of Ireland, off the Beara Peninsula today.

And what you see behind us here is the bull, the cow, and the calf.

This is an extremely complex area, both from a topography point of view.

What you're seeing is very vertical land masses jutting out of the water here.

And similarly to what you can't see, the entire water scape or seabed area around here has these rock features standing proud, which is effectively an extension of the peninsula underwater.

As the tides and the currents move in around this area, there's a lot of movement and confusion effectively.

So you get a lot of turbidity on the surface.

This particular area is where the oceanographic currents split and the tides, as they rise and ebb, pull north along the west coast and they pull east along the south coast here.

So we get this tidal split off, and the tide accelerates as it comes in around this southwesterly most prominent topographic feature effectively.

♪♪ -On the east coast where the seabed is generally sandy or muddy, the tidal currents stir up the sand and the mud.

And this means that the topography of the sea floor is constantly changing.

This is most noticeable in Dublin Bay and the area around the notorious Kish Bank.

-The Kish Bank is an area off Dublin Bay, which is of risk to navigation.

Historically, it's a north-south elongated sandbar which runs to 2 to 5 meters below the sea surface in places whilst the water around it is in the region of 30 meters.

And lighthouses have been critical in terms of navigation, in terms of the entry into the port, and vessels have grounded on that on numerous occasions.

-In 1810, the Corporation for Preserving and Improving the Port of Dublin decided to place a light ship on the Kish Bank.

And in November 1811, the light ship Richmond came into service.

Over the next 154 years, different light ships marked the Kish Bank.

In 1965, the Kish Bank Lighthouse came into service.

The last lighthouse to be built in Ireland with accommodation for lighthouse keepers.

Lighthouse keepers lived on the Kish Lighthouse until 1992, when it was automated.

The Kish Bank Lighthouse, the Poolbeg Lighthouse, and the Baily Lighthouse are just three of the crucial aids to navigation used by ships entering and leaving Dublin port.

♪♪ ♪♪ Blackrock Lighthouse, County Mayo.

Wind force -- 1, calm.

Shroove Lighthouse, County Donegal.

Wind force -- 2, light breeze, small wavelets.

Old Head of Kinsale County Cork.

Wind force -- 4, moderate breeze, small waves, white horses.

Valentia Lighthouse, County Kerry.

Wind force -- 5, fresh breeze, moderate waves.

Chance of some spray.

Admiral Beaufort was in charge of the UK Hydrographic Office for more than a quarter of a century and was responsible for the production of highly detailed and remarkably accurate nautical charts all over the world.

But today, he is much better known for devising a method to describe wind strength based on the appearance of the sea, known as the Beaufort wind scale, a scale that is still used today.

Beaufort's original scale went from zero to 13, but he later refined it so that it peaked at 12, described simply as "hurricane."

♪♪ St. John's Point Lighthouse, County Donegal.

Wind force -- 6 to 7, near gale.

White foam from breaking waves blown in streaks along the direction of the wind.

Inishtearaght Lighthouse, County Kerry.

Severe gale, force nine.

High waves, crests of waves begin to topple, tumble, and fall over.

Eagle Island lighthouse, County Mayo.

Storm force -- 10.

Very high waves.

The whole surface of the sea takes on a white appearance.

-Wind is the movement of air, and air moves from an area of high pressure to low pressure.

High pressure means there's a lot of air molecules, whereas low pressure, there's less air molecules.

So if you have high pressure, lots of molecules beside low pressure, they'll tend to rush towards that.

So that's called wind, the movement of air molecules.

The wind does everything, really.

It whips up the sea and then storms further out, cause the swell, the long period waves.

So the wind is of huge importance to the mariner.

-One of the things about Ireland is geographically, it's an island off an island off a continent in the middle of a very dynamic ocean and a very dynamic sea.

What you have really is a very exposed landmass on the north coast and the south coast, but particularly the west coast is very exposed to what the Atlantic will produce.

-It can go from calm for zero on the Beaufort scale to a high force 4, which is quite significant.

-It can change in a matter of 10 or 15 minutes.

You can have a beautiful day, and the next thing is you get a squall coming in from the west.

This happens especially in west and northwest wind, and you can have winds going from 10 to 15 knots, up to 40 knots within 5 or 10 minutes.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -Well, the damage can be absolutely enormous.

And one of the big challenges is about the fact that we're sitting out in the ocean.

One of the biggest factors that drives up eventually the wave heights is the distance over which a wave has traveled.

And obviously in an ocean, that could be thousands of kilometers, whereas in an enclosed sea like the Mediterranean, it can be much, much smaller.

So the potential energy is enormous.

So obviously, we're looking at huge walls of water coming onshore.

And that's a mighty force, and with a force like that, it can quickly over-topple existing coastal defenses.

It can start to erode the coastline.

And it can start to do all sorts of damage to infrastructure, as well.

In terms of a typical wave, the first thing to remember is that the water isn't actually moving vast distances across the surface.

It's actually the water is oscillating.

It's the energy that's moving across the surface.

-When we think of waves, we think of water moving.

That's not the case.

So it's like we don't see light waves and we don't see radio waves.

We actually do see water waves, but it's really energy moving.

The waves we're talking about are gravity waves.

They're formed out in the ocean.

And when they're out in the ocean, they're actually quite well behaved.

And they follow something we call linear wave theory.

But as the waves move towards the shoreline, things start to happen.

♪♪ If you can imagine the first wave in a group of waves traveling towards the shoreline, the first one will slow down first.

The following waves are still traveling a little bit faster than the first wave, and they start to bunch up.

Now, this effect is called shoaling.

What happens in shoaling is that the waves bunch up, they get squeezed together, but they still have the same energy, and that energy has to go somewhere.

So what actually happens is the wave heights increase.

The pinnacle of this process is the breaking wave, and the plunging breaker is the most violent.

It's got the largest force.

If you think of a car driving at 100 kilometers an hour and it hits a brick wall at a very sudden impact, the force associated with that is approximately 1,000 kilonewtons.

Now, if we look at the Fastnet, the largest wave that has been calculated to land or break on that lighthouse is about 16 meters.

And the force behind that is 20,000 kilonewtons.

So it's 20 times the force that a car going at 100 kilometers an hour can produce.

So that's the type of force we're talking about when we're talking about breaking waves.

-When I was on the Fastnet, we would get a storm during the winter months I reckoned on average about once every fortnight.

But on this occasion anyhow, I had never seen the sea as angry.

While I was standing in the kitchen up at the top and holding on to the kitchen sink, this wave, it just hit us, such a ferocious belt.

And if I did not put my foot out to correct my balance, I would have fallen.

Everything that was on the dresser came flying off down and on to the ground, and water came tearing in every peephole it could find.

I have never, ever, ever seen a sea as angry ever, even since.

-One of the most fascinating changes in the storm regime for Ireland is the tropical component.

And that's really the tail end or the extra-tropical remnants of hurricanes.

And Ophelia is a good example of that.

-Good evening and welcome to this extended Six One News on the day storm Ophelia swept across the country from Dingle to Donegal.

In the words of [speaks indistinctly] "A violent and destructive storm which tragically has caused fatalities as well as widespread damage and disruption."

-It's only recently in 2015 that we've started naming storms.

I suppose the most famous one of all in recent times is Ophelia.

Ophelia actually was a category 1 hurricane, just six hours away from Ireland, which was fairly extraordinary.

-Ophelia obviously formed as a hurricane off the Azores, reached category 3 status, which is the first hurricane ever to reach category 3 status on the eastern side of the Atlantic.

Didn't do what most of them do, which is travel across the Atlantic to the Americas, but decided to head straight north eastwards to Ireland.

And as a result, it was an exceptional storm.

It produced exceptional high winds and also exceptional high waves.

And the record instrumental wave recorded for Ireland so far is 26.1 meters from the Kinsale Gas platform just off the south coast of Ireland.

-I've been on to the Fastnet.

I've been all around the coast.

Witnessed a lot of storms.

But to live through that storm, by Jesus.

It had some power.

Some power.

-In 2017, Alan Boyers was the attendant at the old Head of Kinsale Lighthouse, and on the night of the storm, he was staying in what used to be the lighthouse keeper's cottages.

These cottages are located on top of the cliffs, 30 meters above sea level.

-We all got the warnings about Storm Ophelia.

And I did all the preparations, closed up all the stores, closed all the towers, and I was looking out to sea in the afternoon, and I was saying to myself, "Jesus," I'm thinking, "Is there going to be a storm at all?"

Do you know what I mean?

Because it was really, really good weather like.

And then all of a sudden, the wind came in from the southeast.

Then it started switching to the southwest.

Then the seas started -- it was like a pot of boiling water, started bubbling.

I mean, noise of the winds.

The sea.

The pressure was popping in our ears.

That's true.

The pressure was popping.

What happened first was the sea broke into the sitting room.

On the next wave then just took the front porch.

Wiped that out.

Came through.

There was actually sea in the hall.

There was sea in the sitting room.

There was sea all downstairs.

It was the first time I actually felt really nervous in a storm situation on a lighthouse.

♪♪ ♪♪ We went out after that storm the following day.

There wasn't a breeze blowing.

It was like a summer's day, and you just see the damage.

Like, it was all in the matter of an hour or two.

It just went ballistic out there.

It just went ballistic.

Looking back, it was exciting, but at the time, it was frightening.

-There's lots of studies have been carried out on the likelihood of future changes in patterns of storms.

And all the studies, generally speaking, are projecting increases in storm numbers and increases in the severity of some of the storms.

In terms of the tail end of hurricanes, as the Atlantic heats up and sea surface temperatures heat up, it's likely that they will stay stronger and move further northwards.

And that brings Ireland much more into the zone of being affected by the tail ends of these events.

And I think Ophelia and Lorenzo are the start of that process.

-Storms take their toll on lighthouses, even ones in less exposed locations.

This is one of Ireland's oldest lighthouses, built in 1806.

It marks the entrance channel to Westport.

-Well, this is Inishgort lighthouse.

It's in Clew Bay.

We're here on a very unstable island.

It's just loose stone.

We have a lot of problems with this lighthouse from erosion.

To look at it, you think this bay is sheltered.

But you get a big westerly swell coming in, and it is undermining the lighthouse.

At this lighthouse, we have no bedrock.

So no matter how far you dig down, we just can't find bedrock.

So no matter what repairs you do, the sea keeps undermining them, and you have to keep repairing nearly on a yearly basis.

-We're trying to kind of reinforce what we have.

We've got kind of an area of land around the lighthouse tower with storm walls.

Those have been undermined by the sea.

We also have a walkway and then a further storm walls down below.

And as the island is getting lowered and moved, we have to keep underpinning all the walls that are there.

And all the sea walls that did get completely removed, we have to cast in new reinforced concrete protections to re-protect it in the case of another storm in the future.

So behind me here, you can see this was the original storm damaged walls on in Inishgort.

These have been completely swamped over the years.

So we've had to retract further back, further back, protecting what's kind of the critical infrastructure on the island.

What we had happening here was we had the full force of the Atlantic coming in, all the waves, all the wind, everything kind of driving towards this wall.

So we lost a huge section from here, maybe 20 meters long to the far end there, where the whole lot was kind of washed back down into the sea.

A lot of the existing stone wall was all knocked down.

So we had to rebuild that, and we had to put the concrete on top of it.

But more worryingly, we've got this stone wall here which protects the lighthouse tower up above.

And the waves were coming in, and you can see where all the render was ripped off the wall by the sea.

But underneath that, as well, there is a lot of kind of concrete that's already been done to reinstate that wall.

But that foundation had actually been pulled away.

And if that had got any worse, it could actually have got the lighthouse tower.

If this storm wall had been washed away, the next was the tower, next in line.

So it's very lucky to get it replaced before the next winter storms.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ The thing about reinforced concrete is gives a huge amount of strength just where you need it.

Out this way, you've got the full force of the Atlantic coming in.

They hit this, it'll all act as one big member, and it'll transfer the force anywhere from a point load from where the wave hits it, the whole length of this wall.

So it gives it a huge amount of strength.

Anytime you hear about reinforced concrete, what people are actually doing is kind of creating stone.

But to whatever shape you want in that mold and to get the best out of reinforced concrete, because it's not brilliant in tension, or if you try and bend it, it's very good when you try and compress it, you have to introduce steel, so steel reinforcing bars.

So that then gives the concrete its best tensile or bending strength.

You know, as stones start coming in and smashing off this, it might need to be kind of patched up locally over time.

But all going to plan, this could be here for, you know, upwards of 50 years anyway.

♪♪ ♪♪ -Roche's Point Lighthouse seems a little small, given the significance of the harbor entrance it marks.

Cork Harbour, one of the world's largest natural harbors and a place of huge commercial and military importance for centuries, offer ships of all sizes refuge once they've passed safely over a sunken reef called Harbour Rock.

♪♪ ♪♪ -We have a very rough stretch of water here.

You do get pretty challenging conditions.

We're at Cork Harbour, and there's a large body of water that has to be squeezed out on an ebb tide through the entrance from the estuaries, so you can have, especially on the spring tide, you can have two and a half knots of tide flowing out through the entrance.

And when that tide, in rough weather, in a storm or in a gale, meets oncoming swells from the south, it causes those swells to to mound up, to become very steep.

They can almost double in height, and they start to break quite heavily.

So the entrance, you know, in a storm can become nothing short of a maelstrom, really.

Could even be unnavigable for large ships.

The pilot boat is designed to take a marine pilot out on to a ship to guide that ship into the harbor and bring him up the docks to berth.

You know, ships really can't predict what kind of weather is going to be at their port of destination as they're traveling across the ocean.

So it's grand if it's a nice calm day, but if there's a big storm blowing, you know, the ship still has to enter the port.

They can anchor, and they can hang around.

But, you know, that costs a lot of money and it delays everything.

So, you know, when the ship arrives, the pilot boat has to go out.

I've seen the pilot boats, you know, they'll go out in force 9, 10 conditions, 5-meter seas, and they have to go alongside that ship and get the pilot up on to that ship from a rope ladder really that's dangling down the side of the ship.

Whilst the pilot boat could be moving five meters up and down the side of the ship in the swell.

So it's a stressful and can be dangerous operation and the pilot boat has to endure what is pretty much a controlled collision as it goes alongside that ship and some of the big tankers.

You know, you can have a 20 to 30 foot climb up the side of a boat.

You can imagine that at night in a gale, blinding rain.

Yeah, it's a difficult maneuver.

-Irish Lights has its own ship, the Irish Lights vessel Granuaile.

Delivered in January 2000, the purpose built ship was one of the most advanced vessels of its type in the world at the time.

80 meters long, 16 meters wide, and with a draft below the water of 4.6 meters, it has a crew of 16 who work a one month on, one month off rota.

Its main role is to deploy and recover navigational and weather buoys.

But it also carries out hydrographic surveys, seabed sampling and mapping, search and rescue operations and helicopter operations support.

The Granuaile is the latest in a long line of Irish Lights vessels.

♪♪ ♪♪ -My earliest memories.

of Irish Lights is probably as a 6-year old living down in Castletownbere as my father was captain of the Ierne, which was a ship which Irish Lights had based down in Castletownbere, which primarily carried out the lighthouse reliefs on the Fastnet, Bull Rock, Skelligs, the major south west stations.

She was one of four ships run by the commissioners of Irish Lights.

The other ships were the Granuaile, the Atlanta and the Isolda.

In that time, there was probably around 500 people working on lighthouses, light ships, and also on the various vessels themselves.

Each ship had a 25 man to 30 man crew, which was a hell of a lot of manpower to keep the lights and the aids to navigation going.

In Irish lights, we always carried two deck boys, so young people from the age of 15 and 16 would join.

And so they were the deck boys on the ship, and they learned from the older, more experienced, able bodied seaman on the ship.

But it was a tough life.

Even in Irish Lights, it was a tough life.

There was a lot of crew.

You know, they were all different personalities, and young people joining had to fit in with that and had to learn to speak when they were spoken to, how to fit in with grown men, all from different backgrounds.

And that would have been very challenging for a young person.

-Well, I was 15.

In November 1967, I decided to write a letter to the Commissioners of the Irish Lights Office in Primark Street, in Dublin, here in Dublin.

And applying for a job on one of the Irish Light tenders.

I didn't say anything to any of my family that I had written the letter or anything.

So on Tuesday the 29th of March, a telegram arrived at the house, and my mother opened the telegram.

And it was actually from the commander of the Atlanta, giving me the instruction to travel to Dun Laoghaire on Thursday, the 1st of February, 1968, to join the Atlanta.

-There was a hierarchy on ships then, just as there is now, certainly in our service.

And there has to be because we all have to lean on the experience of the people that have gone before us.

There's an awful lot of seamanship and danger involved with the job we do, but because of our experience and expertise, it doesn't seem that way.

-The ship that I was on, the Atlanta, was very much naval orientated.

Like, say, for example, if we met any of the officers in the morning, we would salute them and definitely salute the captain.

You know, just give him the salute and "Morning, sir."

My grandfather, my father, my brother, and myself served on the Irish Light standards.

In 1959, my father became coxswain on the Ierne.

That would mean he'd be responsible for the lifeboats, the cutters, and the motor boats, and also would be in charge of the cutter when the cutter went in to do the relief.

I always had a kind of a fascination with the Irish Lights, I suppose, going back as a very young child, seeing my father coming home in the evening dressed in the uniform and P-cap and all that, you know?

Particularly, I suppose, after seeing the Discovery program back in 1964, where they showed the Brian Cleeve to carry out the relief of the Fastnet the Bull Rock and the Skellig.

-Services run from Dublin, and we can be proud of it as something truly Irish and the finest of its kind.

But in the truest sense, lighthouses have no nationality.

They serve the shipping of the world.

Even in war, they are neutral, pledged only to save life, to guide ships into harbor, away from reefs and rocky headlands, sandbanks, and shoals.

-My father was shown that as a lot of the cruel men were.

It was a great -- I suppose a great sense of pride really.

I'm very proud of my father and, you know, seeing him on national television and, you know, I suppose proud to see so many of the seamen from the Ierne on television, as well.

-Because we are Europe's western outpost, our shores are of immense importance and could be of immense danger to Atlantic shipping.

Our lighthouse service has to be elaborate.

Behind the network of light ships and towers lies an unsleeping organization, more than 100 keepers, several tenders, like the Ierne, cutter, launches, port and harbor installations, stores and communications.

-My father, as I say, he was a coxswain.

He'd be responsible then for carrying out the relief.

And he'd sit back at the stern of the cutter, and he would direct the oarsmen, say when to pull with the backwater to carry out the relief.

And sometimes actually, I think my father would be going in to do the relief, and the captain then might get a little bit worried that the weather was a bit rough, and he would blow the whistle maybe three times, I think.

That would be an instruction for my father to return to the ship, but I think nearly all the time, my father just ignored that and plowed ahead.

[ Laughs ] -The ship would take two hours to get steam up, leave Castletownbere with a relief crew of lighthouse keepers.

The baskets and men were then put into a cutter, an open boat, and towed in under the lighthouse derrick if the weather wasn't good enough to get alongside.

A grass rope, as they call it, a manila rope would come down with a seat.

They would sit across that and get lifted out of the boat and on to the lighthouse.

The off coming crew then would do the same.

They would sit on this rope, swung out over the the cutter, which was under oars now at this stage and under the command of a coxswain.

He would hold the boat under the hook, and they would be swung out and down on to the boat.

♪♪ -That's where really the of the boatmen came in, because they had to judge the rise and the fall of the tide, if the tide would take the cutter off course, and the cutter had to be directly under the lightkeeper and under the bosun's chair as the lightkeeper came down.

And then my father would catch the rope and guide him in safely into the cutter.

But if the cutter moved, the lightkeeper could, you know, literally end up in the sea or something like that.

-That was how it was done up until around 1972, when the helicopter, with the advent of the helicopter came in, and that was the end of the ship.

-We knew helicopters were being introduced on a trial basis, and if successful, it would be probable that this ship would be withdrawn.

-But ultimately, is the helicopter not going to leave all of you redundant?

-We hope not, but -- Well, maybe in a long, long time ahead.

The helicopter's here, and we're due to go.

I don't like them, but I don't think there's much I can do about them.

They're here to stay.

-There was no more need for ships to bring people, lighthouse keepers, technicians, and all their stores to a lighthouse.

And that was the end, actually, of the Ierne.

And that's when she sailed from Castletown back up to Dublin, unloaded, and then was sold out of service.

When I was a young man in Irish Lights, we started off with four ships.

As I grew up and decided to go to sea myself, we had two then.

We had the Granuaile and the Atlanta.

But the roles were changing then.

We were still doing a fair bit of lighthouse work, but buoy work was getting more prevalent and important.

It was soon found out that the two ships, because of their design, weren't able to keep up with the demands of work on them.

So this Granuaile was designed.

She actually does the work of two ships, but she is much bigger, albeit with a much smaller crew than the other ships had.

Buoys have become bigger.

Whereas in the past, buoys were virtually just a steel buoy with a light on top of it.

But now they have much more than a light.

They'll have a recon.

They'll have AIS.

They have MET equipment.

Meaning that we have to have a bigger buoy to house all the batteries and solar panels to power all these services which the buoys are providing.

And this ship, by the very nature of her design, is able to attend these buoys to get to them in weather that the older ships never would have had.

She's totally maneuverable, and we lift buoys about the half way mark, which we can create great shelter to lift them on board.

In addition, on the older ships, in tide ways and in rivers, we would have to anchor ahead of the buoys and drift down on to the buoys, hold the anchors, and then take them on board to be able to control a buoy lift.

This Granuaile has dynamic positioning.

We don't need to drop anchors to hold our position close to buoys in order to give them a controlled lift on board.

-The Granuaile has been in service since January 2000 and is part of a long line of Irish Lights ships.

At the end of the 19th century, the SS Alexandria was photographed by Robert Ball during the annual tours of inspection by the commissioners.

At the very beginning of the 20th century, the first Ierne brought every single granite block out to the Fastnet Rock for the construction of the new lighthouse.

In the 1970s, Irish Lights had four ships -- the Atlanta, the Granuaile, the Isolda, and the Ierne, The current Granuaile is due to be replaced in 2028, having given almost three decades of service to everyone who goes to sea around Ireland's coast.

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