Irish Merchant Ships and Shipowners: An Outline History of Powered Ships from the Beginning of Steam Navigation. The Irish Mercantile Marine 1815 – 2015 was recently published (2025) and is the incredible lifetime’s work of Terry Conlon. He is to be admired, congratulated and applauded in equal measures. It’s an authoritative text with 584 pages and contains more than 500 illustrations, many rare. Terry includes all powered ships and owners of Ireland since 1815. He deals with a wealth of various topics, including Politics, Gun Running, Independence, Flag Controversy, WW2 Challengers, Growth and Decline.
Irish Merchant Ships and Shipowners by Terry Conlan
This book owes its existence to a desire to gather into one volume what is an outline of Irish ship owning and the many steam ships and motorships operated over the years. Two earlier works gave broad form to the way the story is told. Principally “Sailing Ships of Ireland” suggested a geographical approach as a logical way to gather all the information. Like that work cited a variation on this approach was dictated by the activity following World War 2 when many new operators appeared in this new Irish Flag era only to be overtaken by the onslaught of containerisation and the growth of globalisation. Ireland was not capable of countering the mass consolidation caused by this and the great dislocation of established patterns of trade. This, I hope, is revealed in the narrative. Terry Conlan
An incredible body of research and a lifetimes dedication here.
I spotted the following review online by local maritime historian and author Cormac Lowth: “… It is clearly the result of a lifetime of interest and research. It details almost all of the powered ships that have been owned or operated in Ireland for two hundred years… It will bring back many memories of a bygone era to people like ourselves who lived through a lot of the period covered in the book and who saw the patterns of World shipping change from that which we knew, to the ‘Box Boats’ of today. Well done Terry in providing an indispensable reference work. Highly recommended”
Deena and I were fortunate to hear Terry give a passionate and heartfelt talk on some of the contents of this wonderful book in Wexford recently. It’s a talk not to be missed if you get the chance to hear it. He was assisted by Leo Coy and Brian Cleare of the Rosslare Harbour Maritime Heritage Centre on the night and Terry was highly complimentary of the support and crucial role the Rosslare crew played including John and Brian Boyce and many others there too.
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Sir, acquired the book several months ago. While doing some research for myself, came across this vessel.
Attendant, built by H & W, Govan #447G,Completed 21/08/1913 for Elder Dempster & Co. Vessel history can be found in Starke Register for 1913.
1951-Acquired by Thomas Bradley, Waterford/Cork. 06/1953 broken up at Passage West, Cork.
Excellent book and great read.
Hi Howard, thanks for this, I will pass on the comment to Terry.