Blacksod connections

“The Spanish Armada ship of Don Alonso de Leiva did reach the Erris shores, probably because on board were a number of Irishmen who helped it to navigate safely into Blacksod Bay”

Second Reading
Fr Kevin Hegarty

Blacksod is a charming fishing village on the tip of the Mullet peninsula. It is the main gateway to the Inishkea islands, one of the significant repositories of early Irish civilisation. Its most striking building by far is the lighthouse. It is one of four lighthouses associated with the parish of Kilmore-Erris, the highest number associated with any parish in Ireland, and a testimony to the treacherous waters off the Erris coast.
Followers of that happy form of winter therapy – the table quiz – may like to know that Blacksod is one of only two square-shaped lighthouses in Europe. For the information of the real table quiz anorak, the other one is in Germany. No, I don’t know where in Germany and I don’t want to know. I have not yet succumbed to that level of nerdishness!
Blacksod has played a big part in world history. Spike Milligan once wrote a comic book of his days in the British Army entitled, ‘Adolf Hitler: My part in his downfall’. One Ted Sweeney of Blacksod can lay a more substantial claim. For many years Ted was the lighthouse keeper. Before the opening of the meteorological station at Carne in 1957, he provided weather information from Blacksod to Dublin. Early in June, 1944, he provided his novel daily bulletin. Ireland, though officially neutral in the war, gave weather information to London. Later that day, Ted was contacted from London and asked to repeat his forecast. He did not know until much later that this information delayed by one day the D-Day invasion of Normandy by Allied troops, the military push that heralded the end of Hitler’s power on mainland Europe.
Ted’s contribution is now immortalised by a plaque at Blacksod lighthouse where he lived with his family. The event was not the Mullet peninsula’s only brush with world history. There was a much earlier one.
The sixteenth century was a febrile time in Europe. Politics and religion, mixed in an antagonistic way, create a noxious spiritual substance. The political and religious alchemists of that century provided a particularly potent brew. It was the age of the Reformation and the Counter Reformation, represented mainly Catholic Spain and Protestant England. As part of the conflict, Philip II of Spain in 1588 sent out the Armada fleet to invade England. The attempted invasion foundered on the twin pillars of English resistance and turbulent weather.
When the Armada fleet broke up, the remaining ships sought refuge on the west coast of Ireland. Their maps were inadequate. They did not show the bulge of west Mayo, including the Mullet peninsula. Niall Fallon, the historian of the Irish Armada experience, has written: “It can be argued that the presence of Erris, looming out of the mist and rain from the dim horizon, led to the destruction of between a third and a half of the total number of Armada ships wrecked in and around Ireland.”
The ship of Don Alonso de Leiva did reach the Erris shores, probably because on board were a number of Irishmen who helped it to navigate safely into Blacksod Bay. De Leiva was the second most important Armada Commander. Among his passengers was Maurice Fitzmaurice, the son of the ill-fated leader of the Desmond rebellion in Munster. He died on the ship somewhere between Rockall and the Mullet. He was cast into the sea in a ‘cypress chest with great solemnity’ before Tirrane, a village on the Mullet peninsula, his dream of the restoration of Catholic power in Ireland, lying in a watery Erris grave, far from his beloved verdant pastures of Munster.
De Leiva’s ship proceeded along the coast and anchored near Fahy Castle in Ballycroy, where it later ran aground. De Leiva and his crew then proceeded by foot to Elly Bay on the Mullet to meet up with another Armada ship that had anchored there. The grossly over-crowded ship sailed for Scotland. It never reached its destination. The ship was smashed to pieces at Dunluce in County Antrim, leaving only nine survivors.