On August 14th, a new trans-Atlantic communications line (actually a set of fibre-optic cables) was brought ashore at Killala in north Mayo – the other end of the line makes landfall in New York. As reported in the Mayo News, it provides for communication speeds across the Atlantic of less than 1/100th of a second. It occurred just a week after the 157th anniversary of the first transatlantic cable which connected Valentia Island in Kerry (and thus Europe) to Newfoundland. The transmission speed of the first cable wasn’t up to much (about 2 minutes per character), and the signal was hard to decipher – they would have had mighty craic trying to transmit Finnegan’s Wake – but subsequent cables were much improved. Even a wonky cable was much faster that the traditional method of getting a message across the Atlantic Ocean; i.e. carrying it on a ship. By 1858, a steamship could cross the Atlantic in ten days. That was a big improvement on the speed of sailing ships which could take a month or more to make the crossing.If that seems slow, bear in mind that Tim Severin’s recreation of St. Brendan’s voyage across the Atlantic took a year (though it did involve stops along the way).
Yesterday marked the anniversary of another landing at Killala – in 1798, about 1,000 French troops landed there to help support a United Irishmen rebellion against British rule in Ireland. It ended in bloody slaughter and utter defeat for the Irish rebels. The French had tried to land a much larger force 2 years earlier but had failed. By the time the second French force had set foot on Irish soil a year and a half later, the leader of the United Irishmen (Theobald Wolfe Tone) had spent much of the decade trying to organize a revolution. Though they had been a long time coming, the French force arrived too little and too late to make a difference – the British had already taken decisive (i.e. brutal) action against the United Irishmen. Irish independence would have to wait for more than another century to emerge.
The picture above was taken in early 2006 in Killala, and the Enda on the sign refers to Enda Kenny, one of the local TD and leader of the Fine Gael political party, then in opposition. In 2006, the Fine Gael party had the lowest-ever proportion of Dáil seats and seemed to be destined to remain in the shadow of the larger, and more successful Fianna Fail party that had spent nine years in power. Kenny’s government experience at that point was as Minister Tourism & Trade for two and a half years, as well as a brief stint as a junior ministry nearly a decade previously. At the subsequent general election of 2007, Fine Gael did not get into power, despite increasing their representation from 31 to 51 Dáil seats. However, the ship of state, whose economy had been accelerating at ever-increasing speeds, was about to come to a shuddering halt. Turns out that the ship was sailing on an ocean of other people’s money and they were about to ask for it back. The rest we know. Enda Kenny became the 13th Taoiseach of Ireland in 2011 as Fine Gael entered government, including 4 TDs from the Mayo 5-seat constituency alone, having first been elected in 1975. He was a long time coming.
Incidentally, the question posed by the sign in the photo is a reference to Kenny’s perceived silence on the Corrib Gas pipeline controversy which had become national news with the jailing of the Rossport Five the previous year.