Sir, - You voiced the whole nation's feelings, as we slowly awaken to the importance to humankind of the oceans and the fact that we have inherited a great maritime tradition, when you gave such excellent coverage to the visit of the "Tall Ships". All were rightly praised: the international organisers of the event, their Irish henchmen and women, Dublin Port Authority, the crews of the ships, and especially the young people in each crew who are training with such skill and enthusiasm how to handle a ship under sail. You were right to treat it as a very great occasion.
But you let the occasion down by headlining it as a "celebration of a more gracious age" (The Irish Times, August 26th). You have few readers more critical than I of our present age, poisoned by sales of ever more deadly weapons by profiteers in human slaughter, by the arrival of a world-wide market in venomous drugs, and by the well-manipulated development of an ever greater gap between rich and poor. But anyone who thinks life was "gracious" when passengers and goods crossed the ocean in sailing ships is sadly misleading the modern generation.
Many of the beautiful sailing ships of those days were driven mercilessly by harsh captains forced to harshness by the greed of conscienceless ship owners. So-called "coffin ships" have become so fixed in the popular understanding of the great emigration after the Famine that to give credit to a minority of ship owners who were honest and efficient, like the Cookes and McCorkells in Derry, is to invite a booing. Bligh, in the report accompanying his famous first chart of Dublin Bay, cited by reporters during the Tall Ships visit, was emphatic that much of the reputation Dublin Bay had for fatal shipwrecks was the result of ship-owners being too mean to buy enough cable for their ships' anchors.
It was hardly a "gracious age" which saw about 400 men and women drowned in Dublin Bay on a single night in 1807, 23 ships lost there, several with all on board, on one February day in 1861, and 568 seamen drowned in wrecks just in the waters round Britain and Ireland in 1863.
To call the sailing ship age "gracious" is to belittle the bitter campaign which at last in 1876 in Britain forced authority to listen to Samuel Plimsoll's demand that overloading of ships, by greedy ship-owners well insured though their crews were not, should henceforth be illegal. Such talk also eliminates from history the struggle of seamen themselves to win the right for a modicum of comfort and consideration, let alone "gracious living" - a struggle in which many Irishmen took part, including James Larkin. - Yours, etc.,
John de Courcy
Ireland,
Grosvenor Terrace,
Dalkey,
Co Dublin.