Men survive after being swamped by monster wave on Bantry Bay

Now you see me, now you don’t — what photographer Adrian Cronin witnessed on the battered shores of Bantry Bay was like a scene from tsunami drama The Impossible, a scene replicated around a storm-clobbered coast.

Indeed, it seemed impossible that council worker Jimmy Griffin and owner of Fastnet Mussels John Murphy would survive the onslaught of water that washed over them yesterday as they stood by the sea out on the Sheep’s Head Peninsula in West Cork.

“I was up the road with the town engineer, Ruth O’Brien, thinking ‘That’s a stupid place to stand’ when the wave came from nowhere. I thought ‘That’s it, they’ve been swept out to sea’,” Adrian said.