BRITTAS BAY – Amharc Éireann: Eagrán 240

This newsreel from 1964 shows work being carried out on the beached ship Seabank on Brittas Bay, Co Wicklow. Built in 1935, the ship was sold to Irish International Shipping after it became beached on March 4th at Ardanairy in County Wicklow. The four-ton cargo ship had been a fixture on the beach front and many of the local residents were sad to see it go.

New owners, Captain Prout and Mr MacNulty from the Irish International Shipping company, were on-hand to make sure the process went as planned. Two diggers worked day and night to remove sand from around the ship while the tide swept in to almost ruin their work. A canal was dug to try and divert the tide during the removal process using water from the river nearby. It was an arduous process and it took the removal of hundreds of thousands of tons of sand to help salvage the ship. Seabank would eventually be re-floated and then sold off for scrap.

Produced by Gael Linn, Amharc Éireann (A View of Ireland) is Ireland’s longest-running indigenous newsreel series. It was distributed to cinemas throughout the country to  promote the Irish language. The first 36 issues were produced as single-topic films which were released monthly, followed in 1959 by weekly, multi-story newsreels featuring a broad range of topics, from hard news stories to lighter magazine-style items. Between 1956 and 1964, 267 editions of the newsreel were produced for cinema exhibition.

To see more of the Gael Linn Collection, click here.

With kind permission of Gael Linn.