Hello. I am Andrew Doherty, the founder of the Tides and Tales blog and a member of the Tides and Tales Maritime Community Project CLG. I maintain and update this site on behalf of the present committee and publish a free-to-access blog on the last Friday of each month.
This project started as a personal mission of mine to try to preserve the heritage of a way of life. The river has always been a central part of my existence and of the harbour communities where I live. However, after the salmon and eel fishing bans in the late noughties, I realised that the commercial loss of the fisheries ran much deeper. For generations, we communicated the heritage, folklore, and traditions of our community through story and song, such as when we fished and where we mended nets and maintained boats. The loss of fishing impacted this transfer of knowledge.
Rather than just complain, or worse, give out about others not doing anything through posts on social media, I started blogging about it. It began by recording the heritage that would have previously been communicated through fishing and its associated activities, and I’ve been doing it, and expanding on it since. The first blog post appeared in May 2014.
But this was always a community response and I have had countless people support me along the way, principally my wife, Deena Bible, my children, and family. But also an incredible bunch of local history buffs who have done everything to support me with guidance, information, resources and friendship.
The project is now a Company Limited by Guarantee (Sept 2024).
So where has the passion to write about maritime traditions come from?
I was born in 1965 and I have lived in the Cheekpoint area all my life. My mother’s people were fisherfolk, my fathers were seafarers and although they were both from the village they met and courted in London. They returned in 1965 to Cheekpoint and were married. I’m the eldest of six and now the father of three.
When I completed my schooling in 1983 I turned to fishing, as seafaring was in decline. In the 1990s restrictions and government policies started to impact the fishing practices in traditional villages such as Cheekpoint, and at the same time that my first child was born in, 1996, I started to seriously look at alternatives. In 2006 the principal fishery, salmon drift-netting closed. In 2008 I wrote a dissertation on the plight of my community as a consequence of the closure.
In 2012 I started writing a blog, as a means of gathering my thoughts, particularly on the social situation in my own community and specifically on government inaction on preserving or supporting traditional fishing communities to remain viable. My means of expression in the blog also reflected the values, ethos and practices that I had grown up with. No one seemed very interested in what I had to say, or perhaps how I was saying it. I wondered if rather than banging on about how bad our situation was, perhaps people might respond better to a different type of message.
Fishermen are born competitors and pulling together doesn’t always come naturally. But we can and do pull together at times; an example of what we have done in the community is this event as part of the Ireland Newfoundland exchange of 2005, filmed by my friend Brian Walsh of Hi lite TV.
Through the blog, I now hope to create an awareness, appreciation and perhaps an appetite for the preservation of the way of life I have grown up with. I explain it and share some of my ideas and stories here.
In October 2017 I published my first book, Before the Tide Went Out. The costs were offset with support by the SE FLAG funding. My second book Waterford Harbour Tides and Tales was published by the History Press in September 2020. My next book; The Prong, Curious Craft of the Three Sister Rivers will be published, hopefully, in 2025.
Our blog is published on the last Friday of each month. Its free to access so dip in as you wish. And if you would like to support the project you can make a donation, share the stories with others or perhaps subscribe to the website. Thank You.