Castletownbere

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Baile Chaisleáin Bhéarra town crest

Castletownbere (Baile Chaisleáin Bhéarra in Irish) is a town in County Cork, Republic of Ireland. It is located on the southwest coast of Ireland, in West Cork, on Berehaven harbour near the entrance to Bantry Bay. It is also known as Castletown Berehaven. The name of the town comes from the no longer extant MacCarty Castle and not Dunboy Castle, which was home to the O'Sullivan-Bere family and latterly the Puxley family. The conflict between the Gaelic former ruling family and newly enriched interlopers formed the basis for Daphne du Maurier's novel "Hungry Hill" named for the mountain of the same name which is the highest peak in the Caha range.

1 Demographics
2 History
3 Local economy
4 Places of Interest
5 People
6 Amenities
7 Sport
8 See also
9 External links

[edit] Demographics

The town has a population of around 875 in the 2002 census with a further 1,000 in the catchment area. Tourists swell this number during the summer season.

[edit] History

Irish Republican Army Commemoration in Castletownbere square: 'In Memory of the Men and Women of the Berehaven Battalion who fought for the Irish Republic from 1916 to 1923'

In 1796 Theobald Wolfe Tone and his confederates sailed into Bantry Bay in French men o' war. They anchored off Ahabeg - a townland five miles east of Castletownbere but the gales were so violent that they could not land. Wolfe Tone fulminated that he was so close to Ireland that he could almost have spat onto the shore - he reflected, "England has not had such an escape since the Armada" - perhaps an allusion to the fact that adverse winds frustrated England's mighty enemies on both occasions.

The deep-water harbour was, up to the 19th century, much used by smugglers. From 1922 to 1938, Berehaven was one of three Treaty ports in the Irish Free State, UK sovereign bases maintained by the Royal Navy. The nearby golf course had been part of the Royal Naval base until 1938. Beside the golf course is Furious Pier. At this pier in March 1921 Private Chalmers was shot dead by the IRA. It was a reprisal for the execution by firing squad of several IRA men that day in Cork City. Fishing is the chief economic activity in the town but fishing only started up in a major way in the 1950s. Ships from the Soviet Union and the former Soviet Union came to Berehaven to purchase and process fish well into the 1990s.

[edit] Local economy

Castletownbere is currently one of the 5 main fishing ports on the island of Ireland.
The area has long attracted expatriate residents, with Dutch and German families long constituting membership of the local community and latterly a flux of Spanish and Eastern European economic migrants particularly Latvians and Poles.
The town has a Spanish consulate.

[edit] Places of Interest

Three miles east of the town lies Waterfall House. It was the official residence of the Royal Naval commodore of the Western Approaches squadron, anchored in Berehaven. It was later bought by the van Ehten family - Dutch supermarket owners - in the 1970s. Another Netherlands couple then purchased it. It was then bought by the girlfriend of filmmaker Neil Jordan. Beside Waterfall House lies the Hermitage. It was built on the site of a farmstead in the late 1940s. Hamilton Erskine Childers, President of the Irish Republic and son of the IRA man Robert Erskine Childers, stayed in the house periodically with the owners his friends, the Bridges-Adams family in the 1970s. The house then passed the the Salamas (an Irish-Egyptian family), the Callaghans (Corkonians) and now the Collins family (also Corkonians).

[edit] People

Famous sons of the town include:

Timothy Harrington (died 1910) the Parnellite nationalist MP and sometime Lord Mayor of Dublin. He is commemorated by a statue at the east end of the town.

Standish James O'Grady (died 1928), the writer, was also born here where his father was the Church of Ireland clergyman. Curiously, Castletownbere does nothing to honour O'Grady.

Dr Aiden MacCarthy (1914-1992) is celebrated for his great courage, resource and humanity while a prisoner of the Japanese during the second world war which he described in his book 'A Doctor's War'. Both his daughters live in the town. Nicky runs a restaurant and Adrienne runs the world famous McCarthy's bar on the square.

[edit] Amenities

Castletownbere boasts the Church of the Sacred Heart (Roman Catholic) and St Peter's Church (Church of Ireland). The Church of the Sacred Heart was built in 1912 on the site of an earlier chapel. St Peter's has a usual attendance of nine parishioners^{[citation needed]}. There was a full-time Anglican clergyman in the town until shortly after the Second World War.