Mary O'Malley
speaker
44 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 13 Jul
Mary O'Malley’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
This was where my father taught us to swim.
In the rock pools along the edge we watched shrimp and the beautiful purple sea anemone and the tiny fiddler crabs scuttling and waving and darting through fawns of yellow or red wrack, their jewel colours sharp and memorable in the summer light.
Just as sharp was the blue-green of the monofilament nets, sheer as nylons.
The stacks of handmade lobster pots, the smell of fish and the bits of shell and scales on the floors of the boats lined up along the quay.
Clear too the detail of net needle and thread for mending.
The long slats lying in water until the bark was loose enough to be peeled off in strips so that the pliable wood could easily be stretched around a homemade mould and hammered loosely into place.
There was much the child didn't know about nets and fish and monofilament.
how it could ghost along the bottom long after the fisherman had gone.
That the boat, as necessary and real to her as the hill under which she lived could be lost, she was well aware.
That it could be banned from its proper purpose, burnt in effect, was as unimaginable to her then as if the hill itself had reverted to its volcanic origins and sent streams of burning lava tumbling into the night.
A whole way of life has been legislated out of existence in the past 20-odd years, and the only boats now are pleasure craft.
The quay is almost empty of gear, and the only thing jumping in the bay now is kids on their holidays diving off the storm wall or the pier head, all without much public clamour or lament.
And what of the people who can no longer work the sea?
They too love the birds and watch the butterfly moths whose names they didn't rightly know but whose habits they did, as much as they loved and understood the sea.
I know this because it was from a fisherman I learnt to observe the mother bird feeding her ravenous young.
How to tend an injured swan for a whole winter.
How to avoid stepping on nests built on the ground.
Learned to follow the silver lure as it glittered down into a shoal of pollock.
A lure I had watched him make with a penknife, a sod of turf and an old saucepan of molten lead.
No favour goes unpunished, and it is the small fishermen who were penalised when the seas were no longer lavish.
Showing 21–40 of 44 · page 2 of 3
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