Salvaging a piece of Ringsend’s marine history

Eoin Seymour arrived first thing on Monday morning.

He parked his van behind the Ringsend Irishtown Community Centre, a sandblaster in the back and a yellow air compressor in tow.

He put on a face shield, and climbed up onto the salvaged remains of a vessel, the last piece of the MV Naomh Eanna in Dublin.

Sandblasting gets rid of the thick rust so they can repaint, says Seymour, a construction worker and the owner of Seymour Construction Services.

It’s heavy old steel, he says. “You’d need to go at this with the maximum power.”

He worked to clean the crumbling surface of the remains of the old vessel. The air compressor, fixed to a trailer, roared.

Grey dust fogged in the air, then turned to brown. The tower on St Patrick’s Church, 300 metres away, was scarcely visible.

Seymour calmly walked about on the stern – the rear end – of the old ferry that until January had rested in the graving docks just 200 metres away, across where the Dodder River and Grand Canal meet.

The Naomh Eanna had been a passenger ferry between Galway and the Aran Islands.

Most of it has been scrapped. But members of the Ringsend and Districts Historical Society saved this piece, said Seymour. “They’re going to mount it somewhere.”

The idea is to display it along the riverfront, said Paul Brannock, a member of the society, standing back as he watched Seymour sandblast the stern.

Brannock threw on a pair of sunglasses and a black face mask.

Galway got the bow, the front, of the boat, said Brannock, over the whirr of the compressor and the hiss of the blaster.

“And the Dubs are getting the stern,” he said, “so we’re gonna do a tourist twin project.”

The Dubs got the stern

On 12 January, it was already dark by 5pm. A bright white light flashed inside the graving docks, visible across the Grand Canal Basin.

A crane steadied the Naomh Eanna, as she was slowly dismantled.

For 10 years, she lay in the docks, slowly falling apart. Ideas for their salvation came and went – including a rebirth as a hotel.

Few of these ideas offered the local community anything meaningful, says Shay Connolly, the founder of the Ringsend and Districts Historical Society. “I mean, they were pipedreams, almost.”

In the summer of 2023, the boat capsized. With its final days close, some locals tried to salvage parts of it.

That July, People Before Profit local area representative Brigid Purcell, staged a public meeting out by the basin.

The wind blew. The collapsed vessel was visible behind them. The group tried to flesh out ideas as to how it and the graving docks could be protected and preserved, said Purcell later.

What could be salvaged would in the end be symbolic.

Waterways Ireland didn’t want anything to do with the boat and likely it was going to be scrapped, says Brannock. “We made contact with the guy scrapping it. He let us in and said, ‘Right. Yis are getting the stern.’”

That left them with a huge dilemma, he says. “We didn’t know where we were gonna put it.”

It has been out the back of the community centre for a few months while the society prioritised the local Bloomsday Project in June, he says. “Hopefully, we can put it on display now along the riverfront.”

They have a few ideas of where to put it, but the next step is getting permission from Dublin City Council, he says.

A spokesperson for the council said that they understood members of the society were refurbishing the ship, but had no further information on the project at this time.

Imagining a maritime quarter

Shay Connolly sat down on a plastic yellow chair in the small community garden at the back of the centre.

He looked out past a young acer tree on the lawn, towards the Dodder River, the red Brewdog craft beer bar and restaurant, a row of Herbert Simms flats and the large white Grand Canal Docks sign.

Connolly says that the historical society was set up in February 2022. Its flagship project was Bloomsday.

“It was because I found out [James] Joyce’s first date with Nora Barnacle was here, and strolled through Ringsend Park,” he says.

All of this was to bring more people into Ringsend, he says, with a view to eventually doing a masterplan for the port neighbourhood.

“The first victim of gentrification is identity,” he says. “We want to retain that. Not to the detriment of anyone. To the benefit of everyone.”

The history of the Docklands is in danger of being lost amidst the glass and steel offices that have gone up around the area, he says. “A huge part of our history is maritime, and we’re trying to keep our identity, who we were and what we were about.”

Much of that is gone, he says. “It’s all tech companies, and we’re not anti that. But we would like to give them a service, show them where they are geographically situated.”

The ideal is to create a maritime quarter, he says. “That’s boat building workshops, boat preservation, maritime engineering.”

An action like preserving and displaying what is left of the Naomh Eanna can play some role in this, he says, acting as a visual reminder of the history of industry in the area and its older generations.

“So when kids go around the area, they can see reminders everywhere of where they come from,” he says.

Racing the elements

It rained on Monday evening.

The following morning, at 11am, Paul Brannock took a brief break from working on the stern. It needed a slap of paint now to protect it from the elements, he said.

He walked over to a bit of the stern’s deck.

“Rust,” he said. He shook his foot at a large bright orange splotch, kind of shaped like a ghost with outstretched arms, more than a metre in length and width, on the iron floor of the stern.

That had appeared since yesterday. Rain had gotten to it before he could go at it with a coat of paint, he said loudly. Below deck, his friend was power hosing.

Water shot through a hole in the floor, spraying Brannock in the face.

It was going to be a long day, he said with a stoic smile.

He removed his sunglasses for a moment, before starting to drag his paint roller back and forth across bent and broken deck railings.

They had been at this since 10am, Brannock said. “It’ll be at least another eight hours’ work.”