Letter from Valentia: September 01, 1997 issue of New Thinking

September 01, 1997 New Thinking:
Letter from Valentia

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September 01, 1997

Letter from Valentia

By Gerry McGovern

I write this on holiday in Valentia.

Valentia island is to be found at the very southwest of Ireland in the county of Kerry. It is the closest European land-point to America that you'll get. Valentia is an English corruption of Beal Inse, the name of a sound near the island. The proper name for the island is Oilean Dairbhre, which properly translated means "the island of the oaks."

Valentia is home to Mick O'Connell, the legendary Kerry footballer. It is also the place of the first trans-Atlantic telegraph cable between Europe and the American continent.

It took ten years between 1856 and 1866 to achieve a successful laying of the 1,800 miles long cable. Much heartache and many setbacks occurred, but the need to communicate was strong.

"On Friday, 13 July 1866, the Great Eastern, by far the largest ship afloat, left Valencia Ireland, with 2,730 nautical miles of cable in her hold," Bernard S. Finn wrote in 1976. "Fourteen days later, 1,852 miles of this cable lay at the bottom of the ocean, the ship was at anchor in Trinity Bay, Newfoundland, and the old and new worlds were in permanent telegraphic communication."

According to Ken McCarthy and Brian Wort, when the first Trans-Atlantic cable was put into operation in 1866, the cost of transmitting 8 words per minute from England to the United States was USD100 in gold.

McCarthy and Wort also record the fact that on May 271844, The New York Tribune made the statement that, "The miracle of annihilation of space is at length performed." The paper was presumably talking about the completion of the first telegraph line - between Washington and Baltimore, in 1844. This last piece of information was gleaned from an excellent website created by a team of students in Esslingen, Germany. (Link is no longer working.)

They describe the period '1975 - 1995' as "The golden age of telecommunications," explaining that, "Revolutionary inventions like the telephone or the radio were not made in this period. It was not the period of the great names like for example Bell, it is rather a period of "unknown" engineers… who carried out "astonishing further developments". Of course, the Internet is one of those astonishing developments.

Valentia or Oilean Dairbhre is a beautiful island. There is a brightness, a darkness, a quietness, a silence, a splendor of nature, a space that you will find here that simply does not exist in an urban environment. In the manner of the local people there is a flow of wisdom and poetry.

For Irish people, Mick O'Connell is a true sporting legend. He had so many offers of jobs in Dublin, and yet his heart was in Valentia and that is where he stayed. Many of his neighbors were forced to leave though.

The cable station brought work but finally it closed down as telecommunications advanced. Locals talk about a "modern isolation." The Internet may well offer a new 'cable' for this island and other rural places. It may take time, certainly. However, some day we may read about a vibrant Internet company located on this small island, where the next parish is America.

Gerry McGovern

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The cable station brought work but finally it closed down as telecommunications advanced. Locals talk about a "modern isolation."