THANKS TO OUR PARTNERS

Joyce Contractors and Developers Westport. Co. Mayo.

As part of our St. Patrick's Weekend Festival we built a West of Ireland fishing vessel, a currach, in the burnt out drawing room of this city centre river side Georgian residence. With the assistance of absailers from the Civil Defence the currach was launched off the James Joyce Bridge and rowed under O'Connell Bridge as the St. Patrick's Day Parade marched overhead.

The Currach is a traditional West of Ireland fishing vessel used for on the Atlantic Ocean. Gabriel Conroy in The Dead refuses to go to the Aran Islands to learn Irish (the Gaelic Language). He says that Irish is not his language. Padraig Dineen and Danny Sheehy, who have crossed the Atlantic Ocean in a Galway Hooker, came to build the currach, literally around that one sentence. It is no surprise that Gabriel utters the rejection of the Gaelic language when standing on Usher's Island the first person to publish a printed book in Gaelic was a man called Usher

Over four days hundreds of school children from the inner city and suburbs came to see the currach been built. It would not have been possible to do this without the partnering support of Joyce Contractors and Developers from Westport. We can truly call it the Joyce Currach. With blue rope, orange buoyancy aids, the skeletal frame, cuttings of willow, white canvas ready to be stitched, copper nails and black tar the scene resembled an artistic installation one would expect to see in the Tate Gallery. But everyone agreed it was better than anything you would see in the Tate!

A BIG THANK YOU TO ALL

15 Usher's Island wishes to thank all of the parties below for their gracious help in the past and they're on-going support on this historic project: ..... [View List]