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.

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