If tides, winds and the Atlantic herself cooperate, on August 2nd four hardy women will swim the 3.2km (or approx. two miles) from Inis Oírr to Inis Meáin to raise funds for the Aran Islands RNLI (Royal National Lifeboat Institution), based at Cill Ronáin on Inis Mór. There’ll be a bucket going around on the day and there are buckets in the shop and the pub. If you’d like to leave us a motivating message and donate online, both will be accepted with gratitude here.
Islanders refer to the service simply as ‘the lifeboat’, a simple term for an institution so revered and respected. But ‘the lifeboat’ doesn’t just pluck people out of the water; it provides the islanders with ambulance services, carries out medical evacuations, responds to callouts, comes to the aid of those in difficulty at sea, assists fishing vessels, educates on water safety and much, much more. It saves lives at sea, and eases minds at home.
Powered primarily by kind donations, the RNLI search and rescue services have been saving lives for nearly 200 years. For 175 of those years, the RNLI volunteers at Cill Ronáin have been braving the might of the Atlantic in all sorts of conditions. This year, one member of the Aran Islands crew retired after thirty-five years with the RNLI, having been on over 1000 callouts. He said it was hard to pick out a standout rescue, but that his abiding memory will be ‘any call where we brought a person or people home to their families. That was always a good call’.
Back in September, amongst our group, swimming from Inis Oírr to Inis Meáin was a notion but as lockdowns and winter continued, it became a goal to be worked towards. The group numbers over twenty and in hail, rain, shine and pandemic we’ve shown up for each other. We’ve celebrated birthdays, céilí-danced, dodged jellyfish, and wrestled stubborn swim socks off exhausted feet. When it was too cold to say more than hello and goodbye, too miserable to do more than the minimum, too pandemic-ky to do anything else, we showed up. Swimming in the sea supported us during the lockdowns, and this is us paying that forward.
So, on the 2nd of August, Stella Burkin, Marie-Thérèse de Blacam, Martina Hanrahan and I will swim from Inis Oírr to Inis Meáin on behalf of ourselves and all the Inis Meáin swimmers. The RNLI at Inis Mór are our frontline defenders and as a voluntary body, they (and all islanders in this region) will appreciate any support you can offer them here.
Go raibh míle maith agaibh.
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