Conor blows 1918 record clean out of the water

A WORLD record set in a Belfast shipyard in 1918 has been blown out of the water by an Aer Lingus engineer celebrating his 50th birthd ay in a maintenance hangar in Shannon.

Conor McCarthy, from Adare, took 5 hours and 32 minutes to drill in 12,613 gold-coloured rivets into a eight foot mosaic which he created to celebrate Aer Lingus’ 75th anniversary and his own half-century.

The feat surpassed two targets in the Guinness Book of Records and leaves the Aer Lingus engineer and his colleague, Michael Fitzsimons, on course to enter the next edition of the Guinness Book of Records.