♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -Ever since they first appeared on the Irish Coast, lighthouses have been the objects of fascination and of inspiration for painters and photographers.

-Lighthouses are pieces of transport infrastructure, which is not something that you would think would inspire artistic passion, but they do, routinely, through the ages.

There's two factors, I think.

One is the fact that the lighthouses themselves are in very dramatic locations, and the other is that they, themselves, can be dramatic.

A lighthouse that's sticking up out of the water, not apparently sitting on any rock at all, that looks magical -- it looks like it's levitating.

It's a tall thing that's, like, a guardian or a sentinel, and it's standing tall despite being storm-lashed.

This is the kind of thing that really inspires people.

Certainly it inspires me.

You can also then, on the other end of the spectrum, have some lighthouses that are quite small.

They're not particularly impressive objects.

They're short, stubby towers, like the lighthouses on the Skelligs, on Inishturk, for example.

Those are obvious examples of that, but they are in dramatic places.

They're desperately clinging on to these sheer, craggy cliffs.

And that tenacity, I think, is the kind of the -- It's a thing that speaks to the human spirit, and it's a thing that makes us want to know more.

Another example of this would be Cromwell Point, which is on Valentia Island.

And it's a short, stubby lighthouse, not particularly remarkable as a building, but it's on a little peninsula.

It's got Doulus Head behind it, which is a beautiful, imposing headland across the bay.

There's an island called Beginish, which is just behind it, which is a lovely interesting-shaped island.

And where it is, it's very exposed to storm waves.

And so, very frequently, in any kind of a westerly or northwesterly storm, you will see waves overtopping the lighthouse.

And even though it's not a very tall lighthouse, it looks hugely dramatic.

♪♪ And also, not just close up, but, in fact, from further away, you look down, and the lighthouse is just this tiny little speck in the photograph.

But because it's white, it stands out, and it really focuses on this whole area.

There's an old saying in photography, which is that the painter includes and the photographer excludes.

So a painter is free to paint whatever they like.

You know, they can put themselves in any position that their imagination will allow, whereas a photographer has to really work hard to place themselves in the elements to get the photograph.

So, we have much more limitations, but it makes it all the more satisfying when we get something really dramatic.

♪♪ [ Bird calling ] -Well, I was always a painter, and when I joined the service in '64, I went through the gambit of making ships in bottles, and there was other lighthouse keepers doing different kind of hobbies.

You needed a hobby of something to pass the time when you're out on the rock when you're off duty.

I paint in the sky first.

That will determine the rest of the picture.

If you have a stormy day, you have a stormy sky, or a calm day, you have a calm sky.

And then stick in the background, which is the lighthouse, the rock here.

I paint mostly seascapes because I'm so used to looking at the sea and I like the idea that it's something that's moving.

The sea is interesting, and the sea changes color so much.

Winter, summer, just... From one day, from one hour to the next, from blues, greens, all kinds of colors.

♪♪ ♪♪ -I think there's a romance about lighthouses.

They're usually situated in isolated locations on the edge of the world, really.

Also, it's a very, very strong, upright, perpendicular.

It's in a horizontal landscape, barren.

There are very, very few trees on these headlands.

It's a man-made structure.

It really doesn't belong.

And yet, it becomes part of our lives, that it is -- it is the arm that reaches out.

And at the end is this ring, almost like a diamond, that will flash at night, and this is the security that they offer.

♪♪ I think that my paintings are probably, I would say, contemporary.

I think they're less dramatic than 19th-century paintings.

19th-century paintings, for the most part, of lighthouses, were commissioned.

Certainly the commissioning body would have had more of an interest in the engineering and the build structure.

So if you look at them with a skeptical eye, one would say that they're overdramatic.

They're usually in storm conditions.

So, my paintings don't compare at all because they're more enmeshed in the landscape, whereas the lighthouses in the 19th century, they are usually the centerpiece of a dramatic rescue or a storm.

And they're wonderful in their drama, but they have very little relevance to reality.

♪♪ The stories of the lighthouse keepers and their families prompted the use of this collage technique because they're multi-layered.

The family that lived in the lighthouse at that given time would have replaced another family that had lived, and their paths would have crossed.

And this is the atmosphere I wanted to capture with the lifescapes.

♪♪ The keeper is based on the life of Pauline Butler.

She came from a lighthouse-keeping family.

And I think that's important to realize, that the women and the people who ended up being lighthouse keepers, it was generational.

So they knew what the life was like.

And I suppose, like an undertaker, you have to be born into it to understand it.

And Pauline was one of those people.

♪♪ She was a remarkable woman in that she reared her 15 children in the lighthouse safely.

Not easy to rear children in such a dangerous location.

-People would say, you know -- People say, "You're one of 15?"

And I say, "Yeah, only just one, though."

And they'd ask you questions, you know, like, "What was it like to live here?

How did you do this and how'd you do that?"

And, "How did you all sleep?"

was a great question.

I wound up saying to finish, "Oh, we took turns at it."

My mother's father was a lightkeeper.

She lived up in Fanad.

She also lived at Loop Head.

She lived out on the Aran Islands, and, again, moving around the coast.

And she was living at Eagle Island when she met my father.

-She lived in the Galley Head Lighthouse for nigh on 35 years.

And she went on to actually become lighthouse keeper herself when her late husband, Larry, passed away.

♪♪ And she lived in the lighthouse on her own and was the lighthouse keeper.

♪♪ -Pauline Butler wrote this about her lifetime in the lighthouse service -- "In 1979, Larry retired as principal keeper but stayed on as attendant of Galley Head for 12 years.

Then he passed away after suffering a stroke.

I was appointed attendant, and it meant so much to me.

I don't know how I would have felt leaving the shelter of the lighthouse.

With all my family gone, it wouldn't have been easy to make the change.

But stepping into Larry's shoes, I felt he is still there, keeping a check on everything, polishing brass work and cleaning the lens.

I see the Fastnet flashing to the west, Old Head of Kinsale to the east, and the sea all around me.

Even when it's blowing a gale and the spray is lashing my windows, it has its own magic and romanticism.

My gracious old lady keeping a watchful eye on me, five blinks every 20 seconds."

♪♪ ♪♪ -I remember talking to my mom a little bit when I was older about what it was like for her looking after us at the lighthouses, and she particularly picked out Wicklow Head as being a tough lighthouse to cope with.

First of all, the winds were very high.

We were very young children.

So, when we were going out the front door, and it's right at the cliff face in Wicklow Head, we had to be tied by ropes and walked to the upper pathway, and then we could come out of the ropes and walk down for half an hour to the main road to wait for the bus.

But certainly, my mum suffered with a large family at lighthouses.

There's no doubt she found it tough.

-It was hard on my mother because she was the one that had to do everything.

She used to say, "I'm responsible for you.

I'm responsible.

Daddy isn't here, you know."

-My mother was a -- Well, she was mother and father.

She had to be very strict with us because there was no dad around.

So, like, you couldn't skive off school or anything like that.

[ Laughs ] She'd murder you.

-If the lightkeeper was not living with them, they had to deal with all the stress and strains and emergencies and make all the decisions of what was happening at home and deal with all of that on their own.

And it was a tough life for women.

-The keeper, when he would go home, it would be a very unwise man to attempt to change the pattern established by his wife whilst he was away.

-And he came home, and so we were thrilled to see him.

But like that, I suppose, if we're being totally honest, when he was going back then, we didn't mind because we then had Mammy all to ourselves again and we were able to get back to the routine that we would have had with Mammy.

I could see that they were very happy when he was home, but I suppose when he was out on the rock, I couldn't say she was unhappy.

Because Mammy's life was looking after her family.

-We were living in Rosslare for a while, and it was time for my dad to move on, you know.

Normally the lighthouse keepers were transferred roughly about every five years.

We were settled in Rosslare Harbor, and my mother said, "Sorry.

We're not going.

We've had it traveling."

And he was to go to the Hook, and my Mam just said no.

And as far as I know, my dad had to go back to the Irish Lights and say, "If I go, I'll be going without my family."

-Well, going away was hard.

Like, really.

You'd be counting the weeks for coming back and that.

And I remember one Christmas John Noel was going away, and I said, "Why are you leaving home before Christmas?"

And I said, "You're stupid to be doing that."

-So she said as I was going out the door, "You fool."

[ Chuckles ] She said, "It'll be automated next year, and they'll have to do without you."

And she was right.

-The Baily Lighthouse in Howth is the last lighthouse in Irish waters to be manned over Christmas.

-The Baily's the last lighthouse to be manned.

It will be made automatic as from April next year.

There's a great sense of sadness, alright.

No doubt about it, yeah.

Mixed feelings, yes.

It was a good service, and we enjoyed it, but it means from now on hopefully we'll have Christmas at home.

-But at least John Noel Crowley won't be too far from his family tomorrow.

One of his two colleagues on the Baily this Christmas is his son, Johnny.

-I remember going back to college then in the January, and I'm not joking -- I'd say everybody in the college had seen me on the Six One news, and they were absolutely intrigued.

Like, "You're a lighthouse keeper?

How are you a lighthouse keeper, yeah?"

-As a child, I always assumed that I would end up a lighthouse keeper because that's what the Crowleys did -- my father, my uncle, my grandfather, and many generations before that.

So it was just an automatic assumption -- "Well, that's what I'm going to be when I grow up."

Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on which way you look at it, I didn't get the opportunity.

♪♪ -Hello, Valentia... Good evening.

Very good.

5-2-9-0-9.

-Other people say, "My dad goes to work, and he comes home for work.

My mom's in the house."

And these were very traditional things.

So that's what I was hearing.

And I just remember that excitement of him coming home and that it just felt really amazing.

But then, also, where we may not have had Dad for a month at a time, when we had him, we had him for a whole month for 24 hours a day, and it felt really condensed.

-We'd go on summer holidays 'cause he was here... -Yeah.

And it felt conde-- And it felt really intense then, as well, because you just got to be there so fully with him.

And his head wasn't elsewhere because it wasn't that kind of job where you'd have to be checking e-mails or anything.

He was very much with us when he was with us.

♪♪ [ Seabirds calling ] ♪♪ -Lighthouse keepers lived right on the edge of the coast, on the boundary between the land and the sea.

These extraordinary locations gave them a unique view of wildlife that lived and migrated around them, especially the seabirds that thrived in the remote and undisturbed habitats.

Richard Barrington was an ornithologist who realized that lighthouse keepers were uniquely placed to study and record the natural world around them.

♪♪ -Barrington was born in North Wicklow in 1849, just after the Irish Famine.

♪♪ And by that stage, it was known that migrating birds actually were attracted to the beams of light that went out across the sea.

♪♪ So the British Association for Advancement of Science, at that time, decided that they would set up a small committee to study bird migration for the first time.

People didn't really understand why birds migrated or where they went, and Barrington was a member of that committee.

And they started the survey work by circularizing lightkeepers around Britain and Ireland for a period of nine years.

But when the association decided that they had enough information to write a report on it, Barrington was a bit unhappy, and he decided that he'd carry on the survey in Ireland for another decade.

[ Seabirds calling ] And the result was Barrington's famous book on "The Migration of Birds."

♪♪ It's a big volume containing thousands of records, and it's an absolute classic.

In the study, there were at least 48 lighthouses and 10 lightships.

The keepers were all circularized every year, and they were asked to make notes about the dates and times and circumstances of birds that either were attracted to the light or hit the lights, which happened very often because at night time they were attracted into the bright lights.

They were also asked to cut off the wings of any dead birds and send them in a letter to Barrington directly in County Wicklow.

And he assembled this huge collection.

And this helped him to confirm the identification of these birds, some of which had never been recorded in Ireland before.

In fact, 18 species were new to Ireland in that collection.

The result of Barrington's work was that, for the first time, ornithologists began to understand that there were patterns in migration, that birds followed the coastline, and that they moved north at certain times of the year and south at other times of year... and that these landfall sites, particularly headlands like Wicklow Head, which we're at today, were very important places for the birds to gather before they flew across the open sea.

♪♪ -The records that Irish Lights take over the course of 100-plus years are a really important meteorological record, as well as a natural record of the world that is around us in Ireland.

And, you know, we can trace this back to Barrington, but broaden it out in context, and you see just how important the work that Irish Lights has been involved in for creating the natural history of Ireland.

And one important point -- they might have said no.

What if Irish Lights had not been forward-looking and had said, "No, we don't want our lightship men and our lightkeepers taking these records.

They have a job to do, and that's managing the light system."

But they were forward-looking enough -- and, I think, thankfully so -- to ensure that lightkeepers did keep these records, and they're there now for all of us to learn from.

♪♪ -In 1984, Paddy Ferriter, the Dingle Harbour lighthouse keeper, started to notice that a lone wild dolphin was escorting the town's fishing boats to and from the harbor.

-I would see one... June.

The first week of June, '84.

[ Clock ticking ] And I saw my dolphin outside.

I know dolphins well, you know.

[ Waves lapping ] [ Air hisses from blowhole ] Down there he'd be.

He wouldn't be going up or he wouldn't be going out to sea from the lighthouse just across.

Straight across he'd be.

[ Waves lapping ] ♪♪ No one knows more about that dolphin than I.

But I can tell you at times without us seeing him at all that he is there.

For I know it in the water.

I know he's just under the surface.

♪♪ ♪♪ [ Seals howling ] -The seals would be up on the rocks, and at night, you could hear them howling, barking like dogs, really.

It was the banshee cry, basically.

The first time you'd hear it is a bit, I wouldn't say scary, but a bit alarming, maybe.

[ Seal barks ] [ Birds calling ] Skelligs is the one that would stand out there with the bird life -- the shags, cormorants, kittiwakes, black backs, fulmars, puffins, shearwaters.

-They were comforting.

It was like company.

Especially, I would say, round the likes of Rathlin West where, like, the puffins would migrate and then, like, it was nice to see them coming back again.

Like, in the spring, they'd appear again.

-...the birds, they called Mother Carey's chickens, which were the stormy petrel is the name of them.

They would come in their thousands and nest in the stone walls.

And when you'd go out at night just to stand under the wall and to hear all the chirping going on, it was like music inside the wall at night.

And that was beautiful to listen to.

[ Birds calling ] -When we landed on the Bull Rock, immediately you hear the birds.

[ Birds calling ] And it's the smell of the clean air the really salty, seaweedy bit of mix in bird gulls, seagulls, all of that together is there in one aroma, in one intake in the nostrils.

And it's not something you'll get going to a pier in a harbor somewhere or whatever.

[ Birds calling ] It's never calm.

There's always noise -- of the waves, the birds, the winds -- always.

You don't have quietness on a rock like the Bull or the Skelligs or Fastnet.

There's always noise of that type.

I love the noise of the sea.

[ Waves lapping, birds calling ] -Lighthouses were of particular interest to a scientist and photographer born in 1849.

Robert Ball, royal astronomer of Ireland, went on to create one of the greatest collections of lighthouse photographs in the world.

♪♪ -Ball was born in Dublin, and for the most part of his life, he would be famous as a popularizer of science.

-He was a writer.

He was a great astronomer.

And his area of expertise was light.

-He's going around giving talks to crowded halls, and he's very popular.

So he's speaking about very complicated scientific events, but he's bringing a very common touch to it so that people attend.

His association with the Commissioners of Irish Lights dates from the 1880s.

He was appointed as scientific advisor, and that was a pretty good choice because if there was somebody who knew about lenses and focusing light at a great distance, this is your man.

-And he was the person who perfected the light on the Fastnet.

And when the Fastnet light was unveiled, it really was regarded as a triumph.

♪♪ He saw light as being clearly of huge importance to the saving of lives at sea.

But he was also a very good photographer.

And for the regular inspections of the lighthouses, when they went round on the boat every couple of years, he took all the photographs.

♪♪ ♪♪ -He's pre-planned most of the photographs he's taking.

So in a sense, you know, it could be said, this is a very, very primitive Google Earth.

This is using the latest technology to capture an image which forever can be reproduced easily so that people will say, "Ah, if that's what I'm seeing there, this is where I am now."

-He was a very colorful character from what one can garner.

And sometimes we see scientists as people who immerse themselves in their work behind closed doors and don't engage with other people.

And they're always doing this and doing that and adjusting this.

He loved the company of people.

He was one of those gregarious scientists.

Back in the day, photographs were not that often taken, and they were all very studied, and sometimes you were told not to smile.

I think Ball was taking so many photographs that people who he captured just said, "Oh, he's -- That guy is taking another photograph.

Sure he's always taking photographs."

There might have been some posing going on, but in most cases, people were quite relaxed.

Which, of its time, was fascinating because cameras were not that common, and people were shy, and people didn't know what was happening when photographs were being taken.

And they would be unnerved somewhat by it.

And I think he put people at ease.

-He photographs the children of the lighthouse keepers dressed up to the nines to the highest rung of their wardrobe.

Very often, you can see in their face they have no idea of what they're looking at with this kind of camera.

But he puts them sufficiently at ease, gets them to sit still long enough for him to capture the photographs.

-He's very much what I would call a documentary photographer, almost like a street photographer.

Like, he's trying to capture the moment and capture candid moments, which is quite wonderful and relatively rare at the time, you know.

A lot of photographs would at least -- The people would be aware they're being photographed.

And he certainly has those.

But he also has wonderful moments where you can see the lighthouse workers and the keepers just doing their jobs, unaware that he's there with the camera.

-This notion of snapping somebody from behind -- it's kind of advanced for its time.

But this -- reading the body language, the relaxed gait of people as they go about their business.

♪♪ He photographs men at work, like on the Fastnet, but also laying foundations for buildings.

And, again, this would not have been regarded as a worthy subject for photography at that time.

I guess what he's trying to do is just show a day's work.

♪♪ In his photographs, he's done a wonderful one.

He's got three gentlemen illustrating how communication was done by semaphore.

So there's almost comically large bats, and that's been used because that can be seen over a great distance, communicating to either somebody on board ship or somebody on land or in another lighthouse.

So one guy is sending the message with these bats, another guy has got focus on the people who are receiving the message and transmitting a response back, and a third is there recording what the actual message is.

In replacing the semaphore signaling, we see the arrival of the wireless transmission.

♪♪ -The really important thing about the Ball collection is that it captures that change in technology that the early 20th century is so important for.

And that, whereas Irish Lights had, through the 19th century, relied on semaphore signals, their flags, heliographs perhaps, you know, cannons, technology that had been in existence since medieval times, if you like.

By the 20th century, it's electricity, it's radio waves, and it's use of the kind of mechanical electrical equipment that is really cutting-edge at the turn of the 20th century.

-It's just at that moment that he captures the last remnants of the old and the very emerging elements of the new.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -I'm a fourth-generation lighthouse keeper.

My great-grandfather, Richard Hamilton, who was born in 1845, would have joined the lighthouse service in approximately 1865 or thereabouts.

-Seven generations from 1812.

From there on, there is an unbroken connection with the lighthouses, right up to myself and my brother.

-I was actually at sea at the time, and my father wrote to me and said that they were looking for lightkeepers.

So I applied for the job.

It was a kind of a natural thing to do.

I didn't even have to think about it.

-I didn't even search.

And at that time, jobs were scarce in one sense.

I was called for the garrison, and I refused the place because I wanted to be a lighthouse keeper.

-The automation was on the cards.

This was an automation that started even before I joined.

The parents kind of discouraged us because they couldn't see a future in the job, so I did like everyone else -- I left school and started work straight-away in an insurance company.

Spent two years at that and rapidly realized an office job wasn't for me.

-Living near the sea kind of -- It has to be a part of you all the time.

And when I came out of my door in the morning, you looked out, there was water in front of you.

You couldn't imagine life without it.

Now, as well as that, you had the Irish lightships coming in here.

I was in school with lighthouse keepers' children.

They lived on the island here.

They were advertising, looking for candidates.

And I said, "Well, look, this might be better than going to sea."

So I joined Irish Lights.

You were eventually called up, and at that time, they didn't have a training school, and later years, they did.

But initially, you know, you went to the Baily.

-We had a interview, we had a written exam, and in the afternoon, we had a swimming test.

So, I wasn't the best of a swimmer, so the inspector, he said to me, he said, "You want to do a bit of practice?"

He said, "You're not that strong at it."

So I said, "Oh, I will, sir.

I'll do practice."

And I'm afraid -- I still am afraid of the water.

[ Laughs ] -There were four of us in the lighthouse service at the one time.

Four of us, all lightkeepers.

We were never stationed together because it was general rule that family members would not be -- not serve together.

It would be unfair to the other keepers if there was two of the one family.

-If I was told today I was going to the Bull Rock tomorrow, one of my other colleagues might say, "Oh, God.

You're going to the Bull Rock with X or Y."

I said, "Ohh!"

That's not -- You're going to have a terrible fortnight.

You go to the Bull Rock and you'd meet this person that you were warned about, and you could have the best fortnight possible.

So very quickly, you would learn to ignore other people's opinions and just take people as you find them and judge them for yourself.

-It depended on who you were with.

If you got on with them now, thanks be to God.

I got on with most of them great.

And if I didn't, maybe it was my fault.

-That was the most important thing of the whole thing, that you yourself would know that you had plenty of faults, and it allowed you to ignore the other fellows' faults.

That was the key to success.

And if you couldn't do that, you shouldn't be there.

And there were fellows that should never have been in isolated places, of course, because they weren't mentally suitable for it.

-I was on a couple of stations where maybe the principal keeper and the A.K.

weren't speaking.

So the junior man used to sit at the center of the table, and you'd have the P.K.

up this end, and then you'd have the next A.K.

down here, and I was in the middle of the table, so we all ate together.

Even if they didn't talk to each other, we all ate together.

They wouldn't speak to each other.

They'd only speak to me.

So, like, it was kind of awkward, to say the least.

[ Wind rushing ] -Lovely people generally, but they were -- Some of them were different than others.

And, you know, less said the better, I suppose.

Maybe it's a good thing that they transferred and moved around as regularly as they did because you wouldn't be able to cope with two people for months and months and months, I suppose.

It's a good thing, I think, in rotating the staff on lighthouses.

-Because, after all, you have three people in a remote situation, and they might get on, and they might not, and if they get on, everything goes swimmingly, which is mostly what happened.

-The term of duty for the keeper when I joined the service was six weeks on and two weeks off, which sounds not too bad, but if you went on, say, in winter time to do your six weeks, you could be two months on due to weather.

And you came ashore, then, for your fortnight, and you had to go back again following your fortnight at home.

And we reduced it in stages.

So many weeks on, so many weeks off, until eventually we arrived at what the aim was anyhow, month on and month off.

But all this was greatly helped by the advent of the helicopter.

It solved a lot of problems, particularly in the relief system where weather was not a factor anymore.

-A couple of years before I joined, there hadn't been a formal training course.

Everything you learned, you learned on the coast, you learned on the job.

But there was a formal training course established in the early '70s.

We were taught basic maintenance of diesel engines, how the optic worked, how to monitor weather, upgrade radio beacons, and we were taught basic cookery.

There was a lady called Mrs. Gray that came from the College of Catering in Cathal Brugha Street.

And she came in a number of times and taught us.

-Fran Loughrey is the last of many generations of his family who were lighthouse keepers.

-On the lighthouses, each of us are responsible for our own food.

So, naturally, I had an interest before I had entered into the service, which I got a more creative attitude out here because when one is responsible, you tend to take more care in your own health.

-Many of Fran's ingredients are grown on the island by himself and the other assistant keeper, BJ Cronin.

-When we started in Dun Laoghaire, we were given basically everything you would have needed to survive on a lighthouse.

So the basics of cooking, which I found fascinating.

But in fairness to Irish Lights, they were ensuring that everybody would be able to look after themselves or cater for themselves on the lighthouse.

-Yeah, food was very important to lightkeepers.

And as you can see, the result was none of us ever looked like we were starving.

-Everybody, like, I suppose, would have kind of a particular dish that they were particularly fond of.

You might save that for a Sunday, maybe, to break the monotony of the routine of the week, that you'd have something to look forward to, you know?

-I could cook somewhat, but I had never tried making custard, so I made it at nighttime.

I put a plate over the bowl and put it out on the windowsill, and when I got up the following morning, I was called for the 10-to-2 watch, which was 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 in the afternoon.

I heard all the laughing outside and opened the door and looked out, and here were the two men playing rugby with my custard.

It was after going solid.

It was like rubber.

[Chuckles] So, that was the end of my custard making.

[Laughs] -On...sometime in the mid-'80s, we had a really good cook, Fran Loughrey, who was a super-duper cook who banned us from the kitchen on Christmas Day and served up the most beautiful Christmas dinner, and we had a happy old time of it.

[ Chatter and laughter ] -The Motor Yacht Club in Dun Laoghaire very generously, every Christmas, got one of their members to dress up as Santa Claus, and he would come out on the Dun Laoghaire lifeboat, and they would bring a hamper out to the keepers every Christmas.

And that was very, very much appreciated by the keepers.

And that would have included Christmas puddings, Christmas cake, and lots of little goodies, and maybe a little drop of whiskey, as well, so... -Alcoholic drink was not allowed.

Those were the rules.

However, come Christmas, we bent rules, so it wouldn't stop me bringing a few beers out or lagers for Christmas or a bottle of wine for the Christmas dinner.

In fact, I had some super-duper Christmases on lighthouses.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -A lot of people would say, "Oh, that would be my dream job."

Like, you know.

Yeah, it can be your dream job, but, like, you can -- Other times, it can be hell on Earth because, like, you can have the sea coming over your house, the windows breaking, the doors breaking in with the sea.

And you can't go out.

Just thick fog for weeks on end.

When you see it on a summer's day, it's like heaven.

But when you're there in the winter and you've got a fog horn blowing for 4 weeks, constantly -- three blasts every 45 seconds, all day long for 3 or 4 weeks, it can get quite depressing.

But at the time, I had -- As a full-time lighthouse keeper, I cannot say anything bad.

I loved every minute of it.

I'd say I'd do it all over again, to be honest with you.

-It was a way of life with me rather than a job.

I got paid for something I loved doing, and I do feel so privileged that it did work out, that I loved it so much.

I'd nearly go back to it tomorrow.

♪♪ ♪♪ -The construction of the Kish was definitely a very unique engineering project in Ireland and probably around the world.

And it's definitely one of those ones that bridges the line between madness and genius.

It's a skyscraper.

It's one of the biggest buildings in Dublin.

If you take it from the base of where it sits on the seabed up to the very top, I think it's about 55 meters.

Totally built from raw materials -- all of it -- cast and sized in Dun Laoghaire Harbor.

And then it was towed out onto the Kish Bank with some large tugboats onto a pre-prepared bed, onto a sand bank out in Dublin Bay.

It's definitely a very new lighthouse by Irish Light standards.

It was constructed in the 1960s and finally towed in position in the mid-'60s.

It's kind of a unique one because most our lighthouses were built kind of the 1800s onwards.

Even some of the newer ones, like the Fastnet, are kind of built around the turn of the last century, so around 1900.

-Incredibly modern when it shone for the first time almost 60 years ago, the Kish Lighthouse is now being used to find innovative solutions in a new era of sustainable and renewable energy.

-We are looking to change the Kish and all of our offshore lighthouses to completely renewable-power generation.

So at the moment, what keeps the lights running out there is diesel.

So you've got diesel power generation on site, diesel storage, and diesel generators, which run a fairly kind of heavy-duty, high-energy light out there.

So we're looking to change that over to a low-energy LED rotating light in the not-too-distant future.

So we need to be able to keep the light running, which is the easy part, on renewable power, with solar power.

But also we need to be able to keep the building warm and dry.

[ Chatter ] -The Kish and some other lighthouses, like the Fastnet and the Tuskar, which are large buildings offshore, need to retain accommodation for visiting personnel because we need to be able to have overnight accommodation out there.

There'll be bedding out there, there'll be timber, there'll be metalwork, so all of that needs to be kept in the right kind of humidity to make sure that it doesn't deteriorate.

And we also need, then, to provide electricity for maintenance personnel.

So there'll be things like kettles, fridges, cookers.

So all of that will need to run off a renewable energy source.

We have to store that electricity with batteries that are going to be out there on the Kish.

And they'll almost certainly be charged with solar energy.

If we can get enough power from the solar panels, that's how we'll do it.

So it's kind of a fairly complicated engineering design that has to go into that to make sure that the systems run as they should.

-It's our intention that all of our major lights will be fully powered by renewable energy by 2025, and we'll have taken away diesel, and we will have reduced the environmental footprint significantly.

In embracing the sea, we have to understand it, and we have to manage it well.

And we have to ensure that we're safe when we're out there.

So, Irish Lights is really at the forefront of this new revolution, I would say, in terms of utilizing our marine resources.

In the past, we've operated visual aids to navigation.

So lighthouses, buoys, beacons.

If you go way back, we're talking about lightships.

The technology has evolved.

We now have electronic aids to navigation.

In fact, we have more electronic aids to navigation now than we have physical aids.

But in addition to that, the whole thing about navigation is to ensure resilience.

So you have to be able to depend on a number of different systems.

-Satellite navigation is quite a resilient system, but it can be disrupted.

So we want to look at what happens if the global navigation satellite system becomes unavailable, and what infrastructure can we provide and do we provide as a backup to that situation?

If your smartphone battery dies or if, for whatever reason, you lose coverage and you don't have that data connection, you still need the ability to navigate from A to B.

And then when you move into the commercial fishing and the professional end of the mariner community, you start to see a greater reliance on an aid to navigation, a visual aid as a backup for the satellite navigation systems.

And that's not going to change in future.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -Lighthouses are absolutely fundamental to ensure safe navigation at sea.

I can never see us switching off the lights.

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