Project Oileáin
The first ever issue of “Oileáin Latest News“, an idea thrown upon me in September 2024, not by happenstance, but by “events”. My distinctly odd but harmless, quiet, obscure, lifetime (that’s how it seems anyway) obsession has come under the microscope and I have had to go back to basics, look at everything, everything, all over again. Sometimes a problem is hiding in plain sight, but sometimes too is a solution.
Anyone still interested ……………
I have been exercised since its inception by the number of islands in Oileáin. It was first published in May 1995, with 86 islands, on the internet, and also in hardcopy, on yellow A4 paper, selling for £5 in the Great Outdoors. But also, for many many years I have taken extreme interest in my personal tally, pre-Munro “Munro-bagging” ? In that context, I have stumbled upon an enigma.
There are three environments particularly super-rich in saltwater islands around the coast, Fergus Estuary, Clew Bay and Strangford Lough. They currently respectively tally in Oileáin at 16, 68 and 1 islands. These three areas are lower hanging fruit than even say the Conamara Gaeltacht, which, despite the number of islands there, the sea is more open, the access isn’t as easy, and to achieve anything the right conditions must always suit the day’s work, so that canoeing solo (I am almost always solo these days – who’d have me?) isn’t always an option.
Oileáin got to grips with Strangford Lough well before going anywhere near the other two. I recall the decision process 30+ years ago to count inner Strangford Lough as one island. It was felt then that the whole Oileáin business would be overwhelmed were each islet therein given a line for a name, a line for a Gridref, and a paragraph as an individual description. That was undoubtedly right at the time.
Even though always focussed on island numbers, I never in the meantime thought much again about the one single island that is Strangford Lough, until this week. On behalf of Oileáin I am always following up on new threads of information, new stories or data or matters of interest about islands (I am a gossip columnist), but also I hear of new islands not – yet – in Oileáin, the project evolves eternally, never stops. In that way I became aware of the professional efforts of a journalist Dan MacCarthy of the Irish Examiner, and I follow anything of his I can. Recently his efforts have started to be mentioned in “It Says in the Papers” on RTE1 Radio in the mornings, and I have been communicating back and forth with him. In that context he shared with me a complete compendium of his works https://www.irishexaminer.com/maintopics/islands-of-ireland_topic-5047622.html. He has a fixation with islands big and small, even tiny things. He generated a total all out panic within me a while ago when I saw he had personally acquainted himself with I think 644 islands, more than yours truly. I am at 559, out of 634 available known knowns. I didn’t know whether to be floored, or delighted and excited, or the opposite of that, and in which case what exactly is the opposite of delighted and excited? Things calmed down a bit when the penny dropped that his project is different, salt and fresh water, apples and oranges, much bigger, very different. We are back to being colleagues …………….
I was about two thirds of the way down through his long list of published articles when I clicked on Trasnagh Island, Strangford Lough. That no mention in Oileáin could be cross referenced was strange, as I was quite busy up that way 30 years ago, at the beginning of all this. I decided to look at my control document “Islands Done” and there was the answer. The islands of inner Strangford Lough, all of them, dozens upon dozens, are treated as one single item, not individually identified or counted.
I’ve been on loads of them, but which ones? I remember some, but not the vast majority. I remember launching here there and everywhere, Killyleagh, a carpark near Comber, Portaferry, Strangford, we had a meet at Salt Island, both sides for the Routen Wheel, Guns Island, and I even camped 3 or 4 times up there. My sole certainty is the Dunnyneill Islands, which I recall was my 100th personal island, I was counting even then.
But I can’t just scratch behind my ear and draw on my memory’s best and throw into Oileáin whatever I feel, or even know I know. There might be unknown unknowns, but sacrilege, there could be unknown knowns. “Stringy” is the term birdwatchers use. The standards with which I monitor myself these days, never mind the auditing (“guidance“?) from Seán in Belmullet and Des in Leitrim, would laugh at such a notion.
So it looks like dwalco and his trusty campervan (the “Van Rouge“) may get to spend some “me” time on his lonesome in 2025 in a part of the world I wouldn’t a few weeks ago have quite anticipated.
The good news, or so I insist on telling myself, is that there is a certain very positive precedent for viewing perspective on where I am now at. A certain well known birder who shall remain nameless, actually not of this parish but well known nevertheless, on a much bigger platform, decided about 15 years ago to revisit his entire “lifetime Ireland bird tick list“, which actually is the default list birders care about. There are other possible lists (world, back garden, 2025, Majorca?), but this list is exactly what they mean by “list” if they don’t drill into the detail for you, and that list equates almost exactly to my personal Oileáin list. In his case he was ethically concerned that as a youngfella he maybe had been at bird scenes where just maybe perhaps a rarity was possibly identified by the great and the good who were present, and he accepted the ID, not from first principles but from the received wisdom of his elders and betters. Now that he is an elder and better himself, he wanted to go back and clean up his story, remove any possibility of stringiness.
Apparently he found the whole business thoroughly enjoyable, and that’s the way I’m looking at it. Strangford he we come. Ulster says YES.
29th September 2024