By: Michael O’Farrell
Investigative Correspondent
JAMES McGINLEY watched as his father, John, carefully completed the census form. It was April 10, 1901, and, as the sun set on the Atlantic and the family’s thatched cottage, the 22-year-old possibly sensed the significance of the occasion.
The McGinleys had lived in the coastal townland of Malinbeg in Donegal for generations but no one had bothered to count them before. Now, they officially existed.
But James, a renowned fiddle player like his father, could not have known that 106 years later, in a packed auditorium in west Dublin, one of his grandchildren would ensure his immortality.
Rising to the emotional climax of his ard fheis speech last week, Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny invoked the proud memory of his maternal grandfather.
‘I leave you with thoughts of one man who kept his contract, kept his word. His name was James McGinley,’ said Mr Kenny.
‘He was a lighthouse keeper on our west coast. Just a lighthouse keeper. Not famous, not rich, but crucially important. Cross the Atlantic and he was the first and last Irishman, the first and last European. In his ordinary life, with his ordinary family, in his ordered lighthouse, he didn’t just keep the light, he kept his contract – that was his job.
‘Whatever the weather, he had to. It was up to him. People depended on him for their lives. You see, James McGinley was my grandfather. He kept his contract and he used it to look out for people, to make their journey better, to bring them safely home. So tonight, people of Ireland, I give you our light, our contract.’ It was an intriguing story, worth a closer look – and this week, Mr Kenny told the Irish Mail on Sunday that he and the other grandchildren clearly remembered fishing with their grandad.
‘He was expert in preserving fish. He’d gut them and rub them with coarse salt that he’d import specially. He’d then layer them in a barrel – salt, fish, salt, fish.
‘When he needed the fish, he’d take one out and steep it overnight in water. The salt would come out, the fish would plump back up to size and would taste delicious,’ said the Fine Gael leader.
BACK IN 1901 though, James had not yet become the lighthouse keeper that Mr Kenny would speak of so proudly more than a century later – though there was a certain inevitability about his career path.
The three-room whitewashed family home described in the census form directly overlooked the island of Rathlin O’Birne and its gleaming lighthouse.
Ever since his birth – registered as October 27, 1879 – James was drawn to that beacon.
Described by relatives as a jolly man with a deep, serious side, James followed that beacon all his life, through hardship, personal tragedy and, ultimately, a second chance at happiness. Crucially, his parents, John and Hannah, had given their children an education that allowed them surpass their farming background.
The 1901 census shows that James’s generation was the first to move up in the world. Patrick McGinley, an uncle of James and one of the seven living in the cramped cottage, was illiterate and could speak only Irish. But James and his siblings could read and speak both Irish and English.
James’s brother Michael also became a lighthouse keeper on the west coast while another brother, John, wound up manning a lighthouse on the Brazos River in Texas.
A sister, Brigid, emigrated to Anaconda, Montana, where her family worked in the copper mines.
Commissioners of Lights records show that James travelled to Dublin to enter the lighthouse service on February 1, 1905, aged 25.
Six months’ training at the Baily lighthouse in Howth was followed by promotion to assistant keeper and a posting back to Rathlin O’Birne for four years.
There, still single and cut off from the mainland by a narrow gorge, he began a tough and often lonely career that would last a lifetime.
Returning to the mainland for a week once a month if the weather allowed, he would bring eggs from the hens he kept as well as lobsters, crayfish and crab from the pots he had dotted around the island.
Perhaps loneliness was the worst hardship but there were others, such as claustrophobic living conditions, late nights sitting up through vicious storms and irregular relief services. At times, men would remain on their stations for months on end as poor weather prevented boats from landing.
But the position had its advantages, too. It was permanent and pensionable, accommodation at most stations was good, with ample supplies of coal and household equipment, and there was annual leave with pay – an almost unheardof perk back then.
In 1910, now stationed on lonely Beeves Rock in the Shannon estuary, James took time off to marry Margaret Heekin, a 23-year- old merchant’s daughter from Carrick in Donegal.
Margaret moved into a Commissioners of Lights cottage on the mainland, No.12 Cloonreask, near Askeaton, Co. Limerick. She must have spent many lonely days in the six-room house as her husband did his duty out in the estuary.
ON THE night of the 1911 census, she was again alone and completed the record herself, signing the form ‘Maggie McGinley – head of family’. But she was in daily communication with her husband via semaphore.
‘She could see the lighthouse, he could see the cottage but, as there were no phones, semaphore it was. Some of the Kenny boys remember her using the flags and binoculars to communicate with grandad,’ Mr Kenny told the MoS this week.
James spent World War I on Tuskar Rock off Wexford, three years on Inis Eoin in Donegal, three years on Aranmore and 18 months on Inisheer. There were also two further spells on Rathlin O’Birne.
But much of this time was spent alone as, some time after that 1911 census, Maggie McGinley, by then the mother of two children – Ethna, Enda’s mother, and Andrew – died. Details of the untimely death are sketchy – Maggie is said to have died in childbirth.
Many years later, in his 50s, James married again, to Margaret Crowley, a Dublin nurse whose father had been a lighthouse keeper. Beginning with the birth of a daughter, Una, in 1932, the couple went on to have six children – five daughters and one son.
That son, Joseph, born on April 29, 1934, at the lighthouse in Loop Head, was six months old when his father took up his final, five-year posting in 1935 in Rathlin O’Birne.
Like Enda, Joseph has nothing but fond memories of James who, he confirmed, was a staunch Fine Gael supporter.
He still remembers all the children gathering at the front door every evening to watch their father light the beacon on the island.
‘There was a red light that was supposed to point to the shore and a white light to sea. But we’d take our mother’s black shawl and hold it against the whitewashed house so he’d see us,’ remembers Joseph.
‘Every night, he’d turn the mirror so the white light shone towards us for a few seconds to tell us that he could see us in the doorway.’ On retirement in 1940, James settled down to a quiet life of farming, building his own home directly overlooking the lighthouse.
‘Every Sunday, he and his friends had two or three bottles of stout in Big Annie’s after Mass. He liked to have a little drop after Mass but then there’d be none until the next week,’ remembers Joseph.
James passed away in 1962 when Enda Kenny was just 11 years old – but if he was alive today, there is little doubt whom he would vote for.
my father who was a 1st cousin of endas mother colm o boyle used to cure the fish the same way as described but after steeping them in the barrel the had to be dried in the sun and lasted all winter
enda should visit us in arranmore
I have information which should be of interest. My grandfather was the painter at Loop Head lighthouse and other lighthouses at this time. I have photos and letters and a note book he kept.