From our base in West Cork, Irish Road Tours does not have to travel far to uncover some remarkable stories.
Croagh Bay West Cork
It’s easy to presuppose the background of successful Irish-American emigrants and their families: flight from famine, perilous Atlantic crossings and the slow and steady rise from the slums of Boston and New York. We love to read success stories, especially those that result in American presidents returning to their Irish roots.
Standing beside a nettle-infested ruin makes a refugee’s plight palpable, their journey intrepid and achievement heroic. One such place is Croagh Bay (pronounced Crew), a little inlet off Long Island Sound, Schull, Co. Cork. At low tide a salt marsh and exposed mud banks provide food for a variety of wading birds. Smart holiday homes occupy much of the western side, though even in the summer months the bay is relatively quiet.
The bay has seen much since prehistoric times, evidence of which remains in a ring fort and nearby tuama dingeach, or wedge-shaped tomb, one of twelve on the Mizen peninsular. Well-documented stories depict Barbary pirates and rapacious planters who filled the vacuum left by the departing chieftain, Conogher O’Mahony, in 1602.
But it’s the ruined cottages that evoke the darkest period of the bay’s history. Indeed, the parish of Schull, population eighteen-thousand prior to 1845, was to suffer the worst and most peculiar of Irelands Great Hunger, details of which are too graphic to relate here.
Famine Cottages near Croagh Bay
Thus Croagh Bay is the departure point of one emigrant sometime after the famine. Michael Leahy survived an Atlantic crossing and eventually settled down in Iowa. He became a successful lawyer and fought in the American Civil War. Like many Irish emigrants, he never forgot his origins from the tight knit community in the little bay in a remote part of Ireland. Michael found jobs for the men of Croagh Bay and one-by-one the families departed until there was almost no one left. Philanthropy may not be unique among successful emigrants, nor the subsequent prosperity of future generations, but unbeknownst to Michael the success of his offspring was about to precede that of Patrick Kennedy and Michael O'Regan’s great-grandsons. Perhaps not in presidential form, but no less meteoric.
William D Leahy was born in Iowa in 1875. According to his memoir he wished to follow his father’s army footsteps but instead joined the United States Naval Academy. He served with distinction from 1898 to 1902 and saw action in the Spanish-American War, the Philippine American War and the Boxer Rebellion in China. He quickly rose through the ranks to become a naval aide to President Taft, and later formed a close friendship with the then Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Franklin D Roosevelt. He achieved flag rank in 1927 and ultimately Vice Admiral in 1937. It wasn’t long before he became Chief of Naval Operations.
Following a brief stint as Governor of Puerto Rico, Leahy was appointed Ambassador to France. He was recalled in 1942 and promoted to Chief of Staff under President Roosevelt. Ultimately, in 1944, he became the first US Fleet Admiral.
William Leahy
William Leahy was a quiet and modest man, and as Roosevelt and Truman’s closest advisor he warned against using the atomic bomb. He explains in his memoir: "It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons." He went on to say, "In being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages".
William Leahy published his memoir I Was There in 1950, and his life was later recorded in a biography Witness to Power. He died in 1959, aged eight-four, and was interred in Arlington National Cemetery. However, the United States Navy had not finished with him and in 1962 the guided missile destroyer USS Leahy was named after him. Thus began a class of ships that became known as Leahy-class cruisers.
Croagh Bay is quiet now and mostly populated with Oystercatchers and Sandpipers that feed off exposed mud banks at low tide. If William Leahy ever visited his family’s homeland, and walked down the narrow boreen that skirts the bay, he may just have passed the ruined cottage where his father was born.
© David O’Neill 2018
Originally published in Ireland’s Own, September 2016