Reflecting on Loop Head look-out role in The Emergency

While Ireland remained neutral during The Emergency (World War II – 1939-1945), the country was on war alert during that six-year period. An example of this was the look-out post located at Loop Head.
The post was manned by 12 local men and was one of 83 dotted around the Irish coastline. The posts were established in September 1939, every 10 miles or so from Ballagan Point on the Cooley Peninsula in County Louth to Inishowen Head in Donegal.
Last Sunday week in Kilbaha Community Centre, Dr Michael Kennedy, executive editor of the Documents on Irish Foreign Policy project at the Royal Irish Academy, delivered a talk on how the Loop Head look-out post operated during the war.
Just one of the Loop Head coast-watchers is still alive. Joe Joe Haugh, from Clougher, is now 88 and lives in Victoria, Australia. The other coast watchers were Corporal Patrick Crotty, Mikey Hanrahan, Timmy Crotty, Peter Gorman, John Gorman, Mikey Griffin, Marty Austin, John Blake, William Nilan, Paddy Keane and Tommy Dunne. The post was manned 24 hours daily, seven days a week and was under the direction of Corporal Crotty. They were based in the now ruined concrete hut, which to the front of the lighthouse. As part of the extensive research for his lecture, Dr Kennedy recently spoke to John Joe by telephone.
“From Victoria, he recalled as if it was yesterday the six years he spent with the army on Loop Head, the men he served there with, the sights he saw and the events he witnessed,” Dr Kennedy said.
The post at Loop Head formed part of Ireland’s coastal early warning system. It enabled the defence forces to keep track of events in the seas and skies along the coast. Loop Head look-out post was situated in a very strategic position on the mouth of the Shannon Estuary. It was feared that British or German forces would try to invade Ireland through the estuary or that German submarines would shelter there – giving Britain an excuse to invade from Northern Ireland. Loop Head was one of four posts constructed at the mouth of the estuary. Kilcreadaun was located to the east and Doon Point and Kerry Head to the southeast and south respectively on the opposite bank.
A coast watchers’ job was to be a part of the eyes and ears of Ireland’s defences. They were mainly farm labourers and county council road workers. Some were part-time fishermen or pilots on the Shannon.
“John Joe Haugh told me he didn’t have much choice in becoming a coast watcher,” Dr Kennedy revealed. “He had been to mass at Cross on Sunday, September 1 1939, the day war broke out, and later went to play football. When he arrived home, his father said to him ‘you are on duty at 12 midnight with Marty Austin’. The call had gone round after mass for volunteers for the coast watching service and his father had put his name forward. John Joe was then 17-years-old, had no military experience of any kind and until that day, had worked with his father in the forge in Kilbaha, operating the bellows,” Dr Kennedy said.
Local knowledge was a key part of the coast watchers’ skill set. Crotty and his men knew who owned the local boats in Kilbaha, what vessels regularly came up and down the Shannon and how the tides flowed around Loop Head.
The look-out post operated in three eight-hour shifts, Dr Kennedy noted in his lecture. Two volunteers ran each shift, with one man patrolling outside, keeping the coast under observation. The other manned the phone inside, receiving and transmitting messages of sightings, weather conditions, time checks, alerts and emergency messages.
The phone was critical to the post and was to most coast watchers a new piece of technology. It was installed at Loop Head on June 17, 1940 and the men were instructed in how to use it. They made regular test calls to local look-out posts and to the garda stations at Carrigaholt and Kilkee.
“As darkness fell on the night of May 1940 and news spread of German forces entering France and the Low Countries, Loop Head received a telephone call from the gardaí to keep a sharp lookout during the night,” Dr Kennedy revealed. “No one knew what Hitler’s next move would be. The post was on high alert over the following nights as the gardaí were to be phoned at 1, 3 and 5am to report any events or give the all-clear. On the afternoon of May 25 Loop Head sighted ‘two destroyers 16 miles west’ which ‘turned and went out of sight in a south-westerly direction’. They were the cruisers HMS Newcastle and HMS Sussex, tasked to take up position off the Irish coast to intercept a German invasion force thought bound for Ireland from Iceland. The high alert continued at Loop Head as May gave way to June 1940.
Dr Kennedy’s lecture also imparted details of perhaps one of the saddest incidents that those working in the look-out post had to deal with.
On the evening of November 8, 1940, Thomas Griffin of Cloughansavaun was walking along the cliff top. At Ferad he saw a naked body washed onto the rocks two hundred feet below. It was headless, badly decomposing after weeks in the water and was missing hands and legs. The local gardaí were informed, as were the coast watchers and John Joe Haugh was sent to keep the body under observation. Griffin told gardaí that it would be impossible to recover the body as in the memory of the oldest resident of the locality no one had ever been known to scale down the cliffs.
Overnight, a group of gardaí from Carrigaholt and coast watchers from Loop Head hatched a daring and risky plan. The cliffs were 200ft high with a sheer drop to the sea without any ledges or footholds. However, Corporal Crotty and Volunteer Marty Austin volunteered to scale the cliffs. The gardaí got rope from a local trader and the two men were lowered, one by one, down the cliff face to the body on the rocks below.
“Corporal Crotty searched the badly battered body, finding two Bank of England £1 notes in the belt around the corpse’s waist. He and Austin secured the remains onto a stretcher and it was hauled up the cliffs. The rope was lowered again and one by one the two coast watchers were raised back up to the top. The recovery of the remains took the entire day and it was after 7pm when it was taken to John Cusack’s public house in Cross, now Foley’s bar, in preparation for an inquest,” Dr Kennedy said.
There were no identifying papers on the corpse but there were a large number of tattoos – the head of a girl with the name Mary Barbara on the left wrist, a figure of Christ on the cross on the left bicep, on the right forearm further tattoos of a serpent and a ship and on the right shoulder the tattoo of a girl with the words ‘Forget me not’ over the head. There were no other marks or means of identification. It is believed the unknown man was a British merchant seaman.
County Coroner MJ Hillery began his inquest at Cusack’s at 9.30pm, taking evidence from Griffin, the gardaí and the coast watchers. He concluded death by drowning. The man’s body was never identified.
“He was buried in Kilballyowen cemetery that night, immediately after the inquest, where, to this day, he rests in an unmarked grave of which no record remains in the cemetery records,” Dr Kennedy said. “When I asked John Joe Haugh about the burial he said he could identify the ground immediately. It was a little bit in from the steps on the left-hand side, perhaps one or two body lengths. He added that Mary Barbara was the unknown sailor’s girlfriend and that a year or two after the burial, having read in the British press about the discovery of the body of a man with her name tattooed on his left wrist, she arrived in Kilbaha searching for the grave,” Dr Kennedy recalled.
When the Battle of the Atlantic concluded, the need for the coast-watching service ceased and posts were closed through mid-June 1945. Loop Head look-out post closed on the afternoon of June 14, 1945. The coast watchers received the Emergency Service Medal but many, like John Joe Haugh, emigrated and started a new life far from the isolated west coast of Clare.