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When I joined the FCA (An Fórsa Cosanta Áitiúil) Local Defence Force in 1970, I was just fourteen. The rules in those days were somewhat flexible. I should have been seventeen, so the officer with whom I filled out my application forms in Griffith barracks on the S. Circular Rd, told me to put 1953 down as my year of birth.
Did I look seventeen when I was actually fourteen? Did I hell !
Continue reading “Five years in the reserve Armed Forces FCA”The Hard Border1986.
The last town in the Republic of Ireland that we passed through on the way to Derry, in the British administered North was Emmyvale in Co Monaghan. After that there were signs for places in Northern Ireland, places sounding sort of Irish but not really, Magharerafelt and Aughnacloy; there was something wrong with the sounds, there was a guttural quality to them. Many times I had heard those place names pronounced on the daily news reports of shootings and bombings during the troubles. So when I saw the signs, I was very sure that they were in Northern Ireland.
Continue reading “Crossing the Hard Border into Northern Ireland.”.
On Friday 25th of May 2018, the day of the referendum to do with repealing the eighth amendment to the Irish constitution.
I am a disabled man, tetraplegic but with some use of my arms and hands following an accident in April 2016, I get around in an electric wheelchair. I was 62 at that time.
My friend drove me to the polling station, it was a beautiful day in late May and everything was in full bloom. I remember hearing the garden blackbirds singing for all they were worth as we left the house.
Read moI brought Robert M Utley’s excellent book The Lance & the Shield with me on the trip to Ghana, and I read it on the way back. I had read Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Smith a year or so previously, and It had piqued my interest in the Plains Indians, and their struggles against the unstoppable wave upon wave of whites, flowing west across the Great Plains.
Continue reading “Robert M Utley. My thoughts on Manifest Destiny”Through my hobby I had gotten some fuzzy career guidance information on professional diving, and over time I convinced myself that I didn’t really like my job in shipping (even though I actually did) and that I should spend thousands of pounds and seven months, remodeling myself from white collar worker to rough and tough commercial diver mixed gas diver. I’d still get to see all the wonders of the deep ocean and professional divers are really well paid…….I heard.
Continue reading “Professionally Diving Prodiver Engineering 1985 .”Algoaisaibi Diving and Marine Services, in Dhahran Saudi Arabia, were at that time running the biggest diving project in the world.
An Irish accountant, who worked for them, recruited me in April 1986. He got my name from Pro Dive Ltd in Falmouth, where I had done my diving training, and telephoned to offer me a job based on their recommendation.
The starting day rate was $350 per day; and he would expect me to do at least 110 days. Well it didn’t take a genius to work out that I would earn a lot more money doing 110 days in Saudi Arabia, than I would in Dublin doing 10 or 15 in the same time frame.
Continue reading “Saudi Arabia Professionally Diving Offshore”In August 1988 I did a very well paid ‘nixer’ for Oceaneering International, while home on leave from Saudi Arabia.
My day rate while with Oceaneering leapt to 850 pounds sterling, that was an example of the big-pay packets, rumored at when I trained for the profession initially; very handy money if I could do my shift in a month, because I did not wish to give up my day job in Saudi Arabia.
Continue reading “August 1988 Oceaneering job in Kinsale & back to Saudi Arabia.”Every diver has one, this is mine.
For the five or so years that I worked for Algosaibi in Saudi Arabia, pretty much everywhere I dived; there were sharks in reasonably close proximity to me.
Mostly I didn’t bother them, and they didn’t bother me.
However there are no divers, amateur or professional, who do not keep a wary eye out for that distinctive shape – made universally known from watching the TV show Flipper – when they venture below the surface.
The main varieties in the Persian Gulf and the red Sea; were Bull Sharks, White and Black Tipped reef sharks, there were also Tigers and Hammerheads, but not in the same numbers.
Great Whites were the bad boys, but we consoled ourselves with the factoid that they didn’t like warm water.
Continue reading “Saudi Arabia June 1988 A Shark Tale”Most of the time that I worked in Saudi Arabia, there was a war being fought between Iraq and Iran, and much of the action laid out not very far from where we were.
There were always a lot of American warships moving around in the Gulf , and fighter aircraft regularly screamed past us responding to tankers under attack in the Straits of Hormuz.
One of our captains was not a dour Hull trawler skipper, he was an extrovert Swede and his name was Sven.
Continue reading “Saudi Arabia & going home from Saudi Arabia.”Almost contemporaneously with the re-instatement of my Professional Divers License, an acquaintance of mine asked me if I would be interested in working for Oceaneering International in Houston, on a Chevron installation in Angola, where he worked.
The timing could not have been more opportune, I told him yes, very much so, and lickety-split, in August 1992 I was off to Malongo in the Cabinda province of Angola, in deepest darkest sub-Saharan Africa.
Continue reading “Malongo Oceaneering; Angola West Africa”