Islands of Ireland: Island in the jet stream

Deenish could have had its own jetty for seaplanes next to Shannon Airport

Deenish Island, Co Clare in the Fergus Estuary. Picture: Dan MacCarthy

The planes fly so close that you can read their livery emblazoned along their sides: Aer Lingus; Alitalia; Lufthansa. Not so much at the moment, but up to recently flights from Shannon Airport were so regular as to have gone virtually unnoticed by the people leaving beneath them in the townland of Ballycalla, Co Clare. 

There is just one occupied house on the very close Inishmacnaghton today, and the other pair of islands here, Deenish and Feenish, have long since been uninhabited.

Though just a few kilometres from the airport, these are islands of the Fergus Estuary which is separated from the mighty Shannon Estuary by Rineanna Point before the confluence joins forces and sends a mighty body of water 40km west

to the ocean.

History

In the War of Independence the islands of the Fergus Estuary were used by the IRA to conceal arms from the marauding Black and Tans. One resident of Deenish Island, Charles Nix, found himself in Ennis Court along with two other men charged with possession of Webley revolvers and ammunition in 1925. 

Nix told the court, that yes, he had had the revolver in the time of the Troubles when he used to row “the boys” up and down the river but since the Truce had left it in top of a wardrobe and forgotten about it.

District Justice Gleeson was having none of it and declared that “if men like the accused chose to keep revolvers as souvenirs there was no guarantee that they would not get into the hands of others who would use them for an unlawful purpose”. The judge jailed Nix for a month and fined him £5.

Population

Deenish had a population of 13 in 1841. In the 1901 census a Greene family lived there — possibly connected to Greene Island a little upstream around Rineanna Point. 

Daniel Greene was a sea captain and was fluent in several languages which is consistent with life on the Shannon attack on Kilrush in 1921. 

They also flesh out the Nix story courtesy of local historian PJ Reidy: “The Nix’s father was a very well-read man and he’d be ploughing and he’d stop the horses every so often and they said he’d read a couple of paged of volume of Shakespeare and both of those Nix lads they couldn’t come out a lot of the time due to tides and when they’d come out they’d know as much as the rest of them that were going to school”.

When construction for Shannon Airport began 1936 there was a proposal to build a pier linking Deenish Island to the mainland to facilitate seaplanes which were the dominant mode of international air transport at the time.

Passengers would have alighted at the pier and made their way to arrivals on the mainland. The plan would have supplemented the seaplane base at Foynes further down the estuary but it never came to fruition.

Forest plantation

Today, Deenish is crisscrossed by a coniferous forest plantation which occupies nearly the entire island. 

It is possible to walk to Deenish Island at a very low tide from the north of Inishmacnaghton Island past Big Venture and Little Venture islands to the eastern peninsula of Deenish recorded curiously as Hurley Point. 

From near this point back to the island proper a lengthy 19th century dyke was constructed.

However, this area is so encumbered with mud, reeds and pools of water that it is next to impossible to see where water ends and land begins were you enticed to so venture. A vast plain of mud extends from the back of the larger island so threaded with streams, tributaries and rivulets as to appear aerially like a human body with arteries, veins and capillaries.

How to get there: Inquire at Ballycally, Co Clare Other: Irish Independent; July 20, 1925; The Islands of the Fergus Estuary Jackie Elger and Dolores Meaney, Cat Beag Books