“One hundred years is too short,” says fisherman Pat Murphy with a smile. Just three years shy of this great age, Pat, (97), has landed too many catches to count in his lifetime. Most of those years have been shared with his greatest catch of all, the love of his life, Mary, (98), who sits quietly next to him, as he shares his memories with Mary O’Brien. While the years may have now caught up with his legs, the grip is still strong in the big powerful hands of this fisherman who helped to set up Shellfish de La Mer (trading as Shellfish Ireland), one of West Cork’s greatest success stories and one of the largest employers on the Beara peninsula today. Pat and Mary’s good friend, Mick Orpen, (90), a fisherman from Bere island, calls in with some fresh fish halfway through the interview and joins in the conversation.
Pat, the oldest of four – Martha, Michael and Margaret – was just 12-years-old when he was taken out of school to help his father, Willie Murphy, who needed a driver, having succeeded in hiring a pony and cart to Cork County Council for drawing materials to facilitate road works on the Tallon Road. After that contract finished, Pat joined his father fishing out of Castletownbere. The family had one small boat and sold their catch, – mostly scallops during the winter and lobsters, crayfish and crabs in summer – every Tuesday and Thursday on the square in the centre of town. Fish was eaten religiously every Friday in Catholic households in those days. The Murphys also sold a selection of vegetables, which they grew at their plot in Droum, just outside the town. Up until just a few years ago, Pat and Mary still grew their own vegetables here.
Mary and Pat Murphy have been happily married for over 70 years.
A pioneer of the fishing industry with an entrepreneurial spirit, Willie developed one of the earliest dredges used to catch scallops and, in the 1960s, the father and son started shipping lobsters and scallops packed in timber boxes to Billingsgate fish market in London.
“We worked very hard back then,” says Pat. “It was all manual labour and fishing played hell with my hands.” Renowned for his fierce strength, Pat recalls how the rough lines would cut into his flesh when hauling in the catch.
During the 1930s the majority of Ireland’s population occupied small agricultural holdings. “When I was growing up we didn’t have running water or electricity in the house and everyone cut their own turf, helped with saving the hay, milked their own cows morning and evening and grew their own vegetables,” says Pat, who remembers walking to Finaha to cut turf, a laborious process, which involved cutting the sods, then leaving them on the ground to dry for a few weeks, before coming back to turn the sods by hand to help with the drying. “We’d then foot the turf into upright piles before transporting them home by pony and cart,” he says, his great hands demonstrating the action.
Pat and Mary were in their late teens when they caught each other’s eye across the dance floor. The dance in question took place every Thursday night at the Berehaven Hotel in Castletownbere with an entry fee of four pence. “The four penny hop,” remarks Mary smiling. “When she asked me to dance for the ‘ladies choice’ at 10 o’clock, I knew she liked me,” says Pat with a twinkle. “Twas the only way!” adds Mary, chuckling.
One of seven children, Mary grew up in the parish of Rossmackowen; her family were sheep farmers on Hungry Hill. With employment scarce outside of agriculture in rural Ireland in the 1940s, the rate of emigration, especially for single women, was high. Mary worked in the Arcade Guesthouse (now called the Mediterranean House opposite SuperValu) in Castletownbere and, even though she and Pat had been courting for a few years, when she was offered the opportunity to join her aunt in New York – where she would have well-paid work as a housekeeper in a residence overlooking Central Park – it was too good an offer to turn down. The couple made a promise to each other and kept up their romance, writing letters to each other every Sunday for the next five years. Mary still has those letters stowed away safely in the attic.
Before Mary left, Pat’s leg was crushed when a boat he was painting fell on top of it. He spent 16 weeks in a cast. “I couldn’t dance…that’s why she left me,” he says laughing.
Pat’s leg thankfully mended and, after establishing a foothold in New York, which paved the way for her two younger sisters Annie and Peggy to join her, Mary did return home from America in 1953. Annie and Peggy never did go back: Both sisters met and married Kerrymen – O’Sullvan and Begley – and raised families in The Bronx, and Yonkers, where Peggy still lives today.
A few months after coming home – wearing the elegant pale blue wedding dress she brought home from New York – Mary wed her sweetheart at the small church in Rossmackowen, followed by a wedding breakfast attended by family and friends in Glengarriff. Pat and Mary went on to have five children.
Lady luck smiled on the couple and Pat gained employment with the Commissioners of Irish Lights, where he worked for the next 22 years. “I went from fishing for a pound a week to a weekly wage packet of six pounds with the Irish Lights,” he shares. While it was regular and well-paid work, it could also be dangerous transporting the maintenance teams up and down the southwest coast to the five lighthouses. The first boat Pat manned was the ‘Valonia’, a 90ft wooden boat, with one engine and one propeller. “There were many times she rolled more than 45 degrees and I thought we wouldn’t be able to pull her back,” says Pat.
He looks back on an incident recounted to him by Gerald Orpen, (brother of Mick) one of only a handful left of the original 19 crew – a situation that, while funny in hindsight, could easily have ended badly.
It was a particularly foggy day. “The message relayed from the lookout to the captain, who insisted on being called ‘sir’ went something like ‘Seagulls in the water ahead, sir!’ The captain replied ‘We’re at sea, lad – I should hope there are seagulls!’ The reply, slightly more urgent, came back: ‘Aye, but these seagulls are standing, sir.’ ‘Full astern’ ordered the Captain finally, just in time to avoid the rock the ‘seagulls’ were perched on!”
With the automation of lighthouses in the 1980s, Pat unfortunately lost his job, as Ireland entered a decade of recession and unemployment. “I went back fishing,” he says. “That’s all I knew.”
His good friend, Mick Orpen, is the only surviving founding member of the Castletownbere Fishermen’s Co-Operative Society Ltd, which was set up in 1968. He recalls how Pat campaigned for the co-op’s processing and storage facility located on Dinish Island to be built in 1983. Mick was one of 16 children and like most islanders, as a child he was charged with picking periwinkles, which were sold to local buyers for export. Mick’s brother Eamon, who settled in Waterford, wrote a book, ‘Lest We Forget’, recalling the hardships of growing up on Bere Island.
Pat pictured with his good friend, Mick Orpen, a fisherman who grew up on Bere Island, and the only surviving founding member of the Castletownbere Fishermen’s Cooperative Society Ltd.
Over the years, Pat has been involved in many more campaigns, including the setting up of the lobster V-notching conservation programme, which is vital in helping to support breeding stocks and became a national programme in 2002. Last year over 47,000 adult lobsters were safely returned to the sea in Ireland.
In 1987, from the kitchen of the house they still live in today, Pat’s lasting legacy was born when he helped his son Richard and son-in-law Peter O’Sullivan Greene, also fishermen, to set up the company Shellfish de la Mer. The idea behind the business was to prepare and cook the catch caught by the fishermen each day in order to deliver the freshest and best quality product to customers in Ireland and France. Mary too had a role to play in the success of the company, spending many hours quietly helping to shell crab and scallops in her kitchen. Shellfish de la Mer grew into Shellfish Ireland, a leading supplier of sustainable shellfish to domestic and international markets.
Today there are three generations of Murphys involved in the company, which employs between 110 and 160 people in the region. Pat still chairs the monthly company meeting.
As he sits looking out at the sea that helped write his story – the tide brings it right up to the back door and under the house where some of his lobster pots are still stored – Pat reels in the years on a life that held much hardship but also happiness.
“A hundred years is too short,” reaffirms the fisherman, who’s not ready to let go of his net just yet.
