It’s only two days until the grand finale of our time here in Ireland on the Haller Global Fellowship Program, and while today was much more calm than most, the activity certainly hasn’t slowed down.
We started today with a tour of the Fanad Head Lighthouse, built in 1817 to prevent devastating shipwrecks upon the rocky shores of Fanad like that of the HMS Saldanha in 1811. The lighthouse has gone through a lot of renovations over the years to keep it modernized, alongside becoming a Wild Atlantic Way Signature Discovery Point and offering tours. Our tour guide told us about how the lighthouse is one of eleven still operating in Ireland after being made fully automated in 1983. The lighthouse and the views it grants are beautiful, but more pertinent to our project is actually the area of Fanad itself.
Fanad, or Fannett, is a very large but sparsely populated peninsula making up the northernmost part of County Donegal. Fanad is incredibly rural, with very few shops and other commercial facilities peppering the landscape. Thanks to the Harry Blaney Bridge, which owes its name to a politician from Fanad who fought to have a bridge built, the people of Fanad now have access to a much closer proper town where they can get their amenities: Carrigart! To many in and around Carrigart, it’s just one of many “one road” towns that they drive through without ever stopping to know how great it is. This isn’t the case with the population of Fanad. Fanad is arguably part of the greater Carrigart area, as to them, Carrigart acts as “main town” with the necessities they need to live, unless they want to drive even further to one of the larger towns Carrigart often acts a throughpoint for. Carrigart acts as the central hub for the rural community of Fanad, and that means Carrigart becoming even better benefits all of them as well. Even the peaceful happenings of Carrigart are a far cry from the solitary nature of Fanad.
This afternoon we visited the Tyrconnell Tribune, a local weekly newspaper headquartered and operated entirely within the small(but still about three times the size of Carrigart) town of Milford, County Donegal. The writers and editors weren’t currently available, but we were able to talk to the man who runs the actual printing process of the newspapers. We were told that the Tribune always sells out wherever it is stocked, so each time they print for a week, each and every paper needs to go out to be distributed to local stores. It was amazing to see all the necessary machines for printing, housed within a single small warehouse behind the main building!
It’s rather incredible– the Tribune receives all its news through pure community sourcing, getting news straight from people in the surrounding area either directly or through people sending in information digitally. This type of news gathering is evidently very effective in Donegal– each paper is filled to the brim with local news from dozens of people sending stuff in every week, and that’s with all the information that they need to leave out! You don’t see newspapers that get news like this very often anymore, and it’s rare to see a fully independent newspaper succeed like this as well. I feel like it’s the clear passion and love for the craft that drives the success of the Tyrconnell Tribune, as well as its great niche sharing all the weekly happenings of a very rural area where it can be difficult to find stories. I think that something like this could work in America, but it would be heavily dependent on the paper’s niche and/or location. So much of American news, even very small things, gets officially recorded and put somewhere easily available, like the Internet. So, an independent newspaper could try to fill a niche in a rural community. Similarly, a newspaper that fully hones in on one specific aspect of the news could also find life in areas with lots of people, such as cities, or a very clear demographic, like publishing farming news for rural areas. Huge upfront costs to start operation and the general digitization of American news will remain massive threats to this idea, however. I think it would be much more difficult to get a paper like the Tyrconnell Tribune to succeed in America as too much of the population gets all of their news digitally, with people being more tech-savvy even in said rural areas. Still, I find the success of the Tribune inspiring, and it makes me wonder if there are similar things already in Pittsburgh!
Finally, I’d like to add one of the things we did in between our two main events of the day, something soothing to the soul and a great way to relieve stress from project work: visiting Gáinne Mór Alpacas, an alpaca farm! Ireland’s had alpacas since the early 2000s, and they’ve become another source of local enterprise and specialty items from their unique wool coats that make great clothes and other items that can be made of cloth like purses. The alpacas were very friendly and one, named Star, was almost dog-like in her love for pets! We also heard about how they sell their wool to local artisans and shops to make into products, keeping money flowing through the local economy. It was a lovely little reprieve from project work, and as we shift gears fully into working on it, I’m glad I was able to pet an alpaca.
