This morning we made the drive out to Fanad, stopping first at the Fanad Head Lighthouse, which has stood watch over that stretch of coast since 1817, back when it was built to stop the kind of shipwrecks that had already claimed ships like the HMS Saldanha. It’s been automated since 1983 and is now a wild Atlantic Way signature discovery point, so tourists can actually tour it, but what stuck with me more that the lighthouse itself was everything around it. Fanad is a big peninsula but a populated one, with houses spread far apart and almost no shops or businesses to speak of. The only real connection Fanad has to a proper town runs through the Harry Blaney Bridge, named for the local politician who fought to get it built, and on the other end of that bridge is Carrigart.
To a lot of people passing through the area, Carrigart is just another one road town you drive by without stopping to think twice about it. But for the people of Fanad, it’s not like that at all, it’s the closest thing they have to a main town, the place they actually rely on for groceries, medical care, clothes, basically anything they can’t grow or make themselves. That completely reframed how I think about what a main street means out here. If Carrigart’s businesses started closing or it’s population thinned out, that wouldn’t just hurt Carrigart, it would put Fanad’s whole way of life at risk too. Seeing that dependency up close made the stakes of our recommendations feel a lot more real.
This afternoon we visited the Tirconaill Tribune, the weekly paper headquarters in Milford, a town approximately three times the size of Carrigart. We didn’t see an office with writers or editors, instead we stepped in a place you would see in those movies with factory machine’s and workers always moving. It was sort of like that except a bit smaller, only one huge machine and a man who runs the actual printing, he told us the paper sends out about 5,000 copies every week and sells out every single time. What makes it work is that it’s staffed with writers from each small borough it covers, on top of stories locals send in themselves, so the whole thing is built from the ground up out of community sourcing rather than a computer handling anything. He said people around here treat it almost like a Bible, and even though there’s a digital copy available now too, the print edition is still what people wait for.
Honestly, my first reaction was that it felt refreshing in a way I wasn’t expecting. I’m used to mews being whatever an algorithm decides I’ll engage with most, so watching a paper run on trust and local relationships instead of clicking online was kind of eye opening. As for whether something like it could work back at home, I really think it depends on pace and density. A model like the Tribune needs people who still have the time and the instinct to pick up the phone and share what’s happening in their own community, and in a lot of places back home, Facebook and other platforms have already taken over that role faster and louder. I don’t think it’s impossible to translate, but I do think it would take a much slower pace of life than most people back in the states are used to.
