Wednesday 12 March 2025 19:30
Restoring and operating ILEN, by Gary McMahon
The ketch Ilen’s wooden keel was laid by her builders 100 years ago, in 1925.
Gary Mac Mahon, a native of Limerick City, has kindly agreed to a request from our club to talk about his 25-year involvement with the management and restoration of sailing vessel Ilen.
He claims there are two approaches to aquatic heritage: “maintain the flame or valorise the ashes.” Happily for the waters of Ireland, he advocates the former. Consequently, many on this island today enjoy the experience of manually propelling a traditional sailing vessel on the seas between the harbours of Ireland and occasionally abroad. Moreover, Ilen is Ireland’s last example of a big-timbered ketch.
Her first owners, The Falkland Island Company (London), had her built in Baltimore, west Cork, to carry the cargo of a now-defunct transport system. Her cargo in 2025, as it was in 1926, is a living one; but the sheep Ilen owners had her built to transport have been displaced by human boatloads – who seem happy to voyage in converted agricultural accommodation!
The history of recreational voyaging, the life force of The Cruising Association of Ireland, tells how our activity’s 19th and 20th century pioneers followed in the wake of trading vessels. It will be a joy to hear from Mac Mahon how the ketch Ilen’s inception was a unique example of the reversal of that order – trade, in her case, followed in the wake of an idiosyncratic 1920s world-girdling cruise from the tidal Shannon Estuary.
While we romanticise individual heritage vessels such as Ilen, they are primarily elegant objects representative of the outmoded social and economic world that bore them. Thus, how Ilen, in recent years, found a new operational life beyond the cultural matrix she sailed amid in “the roaring twenties” will be a fascinating aspect of Mac Mahon’s discourse.
A myriad of stories envelop his repatriation of Ilen from the Falkland Islands in 1997 – tales of how the project Mac Mahon kicked off somehow navigated the Irish cultural space that Ilen returned to after a 71-year absence, plying her interisland trade in the South Atlantic.
Our Wednesday club night talk Maintaining the Flame will allow the audience to probe how Ilen successfully rode the broken waters of a largely land-centric nation between 1997 and 2018 to make an operational return to Irish waters, but this time in the service of a 21st century Irish community.