A WINTER HOLIDAY on an island off Cork turned to disaster when a small boat capsized off the coast in the early hours of  Friday morning.

A 62-year-old Swiss tourist died when the 5m (16ft) punt in which he was travelling with nine other men and their luggage, capsised in a heavy swell and winds gusting up to 100km/h (62mph).

The boat, which was also packed with luggage, was heading to Coney Island, a privately-owned island less than half a mile off the Cork coast. None of the men were wearing life jackets, it seems and eight of the nine survivors spent a number of hours clinging to their boat before they were swept ashore by the tide.

Michael O'Regan of the Goleen Coast Guard said the fact that nine of the 10 men managed to survive the tragedy. was "a miracle"
"As far as we could see nobody was wearing a life jacket. I did not see life jackets anyway," he added.

The man who died had arrived in Ireland the night before along with eight friends to stay at a holiday home on Coney Island, owned by Irishman Michael McGill.

All aged between 55 and 62, the group left Colla Pier near Schull in west Cork shortly after the pubs closed at 11.30pm on Thursday. The boat's engine failed at Long Island Sound and the boat capsized shortly after 1am.

It took until sometime after 2am for the alarm to be raised when one of the 10 men managed to swim ashore to nearby Long Island, which only has a few residents. The other survivors were washed ashore to Long Island by 4am. The man who died was found on the beach by members of the Baltimore RNLI lifeboat crew, w called to the scene along with lifeboats from Baltimore and Castletownbere.

Eight survivors made their way to a vacant house on Long Island not knowing a ninth member of their party had already raised the alarm and were relieved to be discovered  in the vacant house.

The survivors were then were taken to Bantry General Hospital for treatment and later discharged after being treated for shock.

Kieran Cotter, coxswain of the All Weather Baltimore Lifeboat, said the men were deeply shocked when they were found in the vacant house.

"They were very cold," he said. "It was very wet and windy. They were extremely lucky they held on to the boat."

He did not understand how  nine of the men survived in the water, which was about 10 degrees.

He also said he did not know whether the men had life jackets as they had removed their wet clothes before they were found.

"I don't know about life jackets, I did not see any," he said.

By Roy Foster
IN SOME WAYS Tim Robinson is a one-off: a polymathic Yorkshireman, trained in mathematics and art, who has written passionately about the appearance, history and atmosphere of the West of Ireland, where he lives. He immerses himself in everything: mythology, legend, holy wells, sea-creatures, bog-plants, the architectural detritus of past conquests, the re-establishment of the corncrake, the ecology of hill-farming, and above all the comings and goings of people. Nor does he shirk the contemporary: bungalow blight, the "gibbering-gables" architecture of cutesy Americana, the destruction of fragile local ecologies by agribusiness. At one point he prospects for a legendary "lake of sand" preserved in local lore, and finds it sunk in the middle of a golf-course.

This is his second volume exploring the idiosyncratic social history as well as the flora, fauna and geology of Connemara, the most westerly region of Connacht. Remnants of a local Catholic gentry culture as well as sea-hardened fishers and farmers, survived waves of incomers, all determined to make a living in one of the purest and loveliest landscapes in the world. We meet commercially-minded English Victorians (including the Twining tea family) and ex-imperial servants, French lobster-fishing entrepreneurs, radical organic farmers; but he also gives much space to the creative spirits drawn to Connemara by that same wish, including - improbably - Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Maybe Wittgenstein's Connemara sojourn is not so surprising, because the very fact of being on the outermost edge of Europe has from time to time projected the region into the crucible of modern thinking: as Robinson shows when he recreates Marconi's revolutionary 1907 wireless transmitting station, and reminds us that Alcock and Brown's record-breaking flight from Nova Scotia touched down nearby fifteen years later. At the same time, the subsistence-level poverty of farming patterns, and the exploitative land system, outlasted recurrent attempts at "improvement", and the bleak evidence of hunger and emigration is all around. Nor did the dark times end with national independence; poverty and disaster haunted the landscape in the 1920s and 1930s, and the terrible story of the exploitation of children condemned to the Christian Brothers' Industrial School in remote Letterfrack continued until much later. Robinson writes of this with passion and judiciousness.

Elsewhere an ironic humour breaks in - as when a farmer, determined to stop his researches on the foreshore (traditionally open to access in Ireland), finally pronounces "I think, just for the principle of the thing, you should fuck off my land." This detachment saves the book from whimsy, and a high style where the sentences sometimes wind on as lengthily and inexorably as a bog-road. But above all he retains a capacious sympathy for all the incomers and outgoers drawn to or expelled from this desolate and cruelly beautiful place. The last chapter nods to a great literary precedent, in delineating a long-postponed visit by boat to a lighthouse: but the author's boat bumps against a lost buoy, bearing the name "Robinson", which he takes as a sign to terminate a work "supersaturated with self-reference". He can be forgiven for it, and the envisaged third volume will complete an edifice as remarkable as any of those surveyed in this book.

Connemara: the Last Pool of Darkness by Tim Robinson
Penguin Ireland, £20

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Reviewed by Katy Guest

The Independent

A Passage to Inis Mor is the story of a 38 year old man, John Carlyle, (nee Sean O'Rourke.) Born in Ireland but taken by his mother to Australia at the age of eight after the accidental death of his father..
As the story opens Sean is experiencing a crisis in his personal life. His wife has left him, taking their seven year old son with her. The advertising agency he owns is in severe financial difficulties, his creditors are threatening to bankrupt him and he's hearing poetic voices in his mind urging him to return to Inis Mor. At first he resists these mysterious promptings but when he receives a letter from his grandmother saying that she's dying and wishes to speak with him, he books a ticket to Ireland. On his return he learns that his grandmother has already died, leaving him a cottage and a dilapidated old sailing boat built by his grandfather.
On his first day back on the island he meets a strange old seafaring man who offers to help him rebuild the boat. As the old man teaches Sean the art of boatbuilding he recounts stories of the seafaring men of Inis Mor, of the Selchies that the island is famous for, and of Sean's own father, Con Rua O'Rourke, whom Sean had thought to be a fisherman but who was, it turns out, a well known Seanachie (Irish storyteller)
The old man teaches in the traditional way, through storytelling, song, and poetry, and it is in working with this mysterious old man that Sean is led to a realisation of his own gifts and his talents and ultimately, back to his heart, his soul and the possible meaning and purpose of his life. (Available now as download or hard copy from www.lulu.com )

Doolin Coast Guard unit - which covers the north Clare coastline - said that 2008 has been its busiest ever year with 43 callouts. Six bodies were recovered, four off the Cliffs of Moher.
A coroner returned an "open verdict" on the death of a Czech national who fell off the 182m (600ft) high Cliffs of Moher in Co Clare last April. The inquest is one of three being held in Ennis this week into the deaths in falls from the Cliffs of Moher on different dates this year.

The the man returned to his Irish home from the Czech Republic on April 4th and the next morning, he drove from his house in Mullingar to the Cliffs of Moher without telling anyone where he was going. The alarm was raised on April 9th when a member of the Doolin Coast Guard unit, Thomas Doherty, spotted that a car had been parked overnight in the car park.

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Clara Iaccarino thumbs a ride with friendly locals.

Erica Jeal, The Guardian

Completed in 1932, when Vaughan Williams was already working on his Fourth Symphony, Riders to the Sea is based on JM Synge's play about a mother from the Aran Islands who gains release when her last surviving son dies by drowning, like his five brothers before him. It lasts for only 40 minutes, which is one reason it is so seldom heard: what on earth to put alongside it?

ENO's solution is inspired.

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