Seagulls' eggs

 

A totally unrelated but beautiful Pat Cook photo of Aranmore at sunset

That’s what they used to call us, says Ciarán O’Bríaín, lightkeeper 570 in the pantheon of Irish Lights’ personnel.  Seagulls’ eggs. Children of lightkeepers who were born on the ledge on which their parents happened to alight. A cursory check of Irish censuses will show a wonderful geographical spread of ‘place of birth’ for the keeper, his wife and seven children which incidentally is a very handy way to work out the stations the father served at to that point.
In Ireland, in particular, a sense of place and belonging is deeply rooted in the psyche. You will grow up and be known all your life as a Wexfordman or a Donegal man or a Limerick man, or whatever county you happened to pop out into the sunlight in. And that will very much mark you down, in the eyes of others, as the type of person you are. It is all down to local history and folk memory and the trials and tribulations endured by that particular section of society that occupied one particular place.

Galwegian Thomas King retired to Wicklow

Of course, it goes much deeper than that.  Right down to townlands and parishes. If you were a Two-Mile-Water man, you could be trusted much more than someone from Three-Mile-Water. Or vice-versa. But each county is a sacred sect. You can go anywhere in the world and might bump into a fellow Irish person; but find a fellow Mayoman and you’ll spend the rest of the holidays talking about Jem Murphy’s youngest wan from Roonagh and did you ever drink in Lynn’s in Killala?
So, the sense of place very much marks down your identity, even today when inter-county travel for work is much more prevalent. But where did that leave the seagulls’ eggs, the children of lightkeepers, born at whatever station their parents happened to be attending when their gestation period came to a close?
It certainly seems incongruous that a child born at, say, Roches Point in county Cork, whose parents were transferred away from there six months later and never set foot in the county again, should be known as a Cork person. Their parents may have had no links to the south of Ireland at all but, hey, suddenly they’ve spawned a Corkonian, with all the baggage that comes along with it. But this is exactly what happened.

Wicklow-born Michael Moore emigrated to Australia

It seems you had to display your allegiance to one of the counties in some way and birthplace was the natural choice, as in the old days when you pledged your allegiance to the local, rather than the best, football team. It could seem strange to say you were a Louth man if you spoke in your father’s Waterford accent but these niceties often had to be followed.
The assimilation of the seagulls’ chicks into local schools could also be a problem. They were outsiders and spoke in strange accents. Maybe they had moved to a Gaeltacht area, where all teaching was done in Irish, and didn’t know the language!
And then there was the problem, after sixty of years of life skitting around the coast every three years as the child of a keeper and then a keeper yourself. Where did you retire to?
In some cases, you went back to your ancestral homeland, your Heimat, as they call it in Germany, where you had cousins and not lightkeeping relations. Charles Loughrey moved to the Inishowen after a lifetime’s service, as that was where the Loughreys were from. Not so easy, though, if you were a third-generation keeper.

Dub William Landers helped his son run a shop in Westport during his retirement

Certainly, some moved near to their son or daughter, maybe to help out. Of course, if they were a keeper or a keeper’s wife, you followed them around the country. Maybe this suited people who had never put down roots?
Some stayed in the locality of the last station they served at, having already become integrated in the local community, like Walter Coupe in Belmullet. Others, like Thomas King at Wicklow, may have selected their favourite posting to return to in their twilight years. Some emigrated, like Michael Moore to Australia, after a lifetime’s rambling around the coast. Very few of them, it seems, chose one of the inland counties to retire to.

Ciarán O’Bríaín retired to Kildare