Inishowen Maritime Museum launches summer schedule

The museum and tea room will be open seven days a week until September.

Working in conjunction with Malin Head’s ‘May the Fourth be with You’ festival, the museum will be scheduling planetarium shows to coincide with the outer space theme of the weekend events around Inishowen. There will be showings every hour, from 1200, on Saturday and Sunday. Look out for Star Troopers as you drive around Inishowen.

On the bank holiday Monday, 6 May, there will be two showings, at 2pm and 3pm, of extracts from the Croi na Farraige – Hearts of the Sea documentary, a new community project in Inishowen, which captures the connection between the local people and the sea around their peninsula in north Donegal.

This is part of the Donegal Community Events programme for the weekend.

Inishowen Community Media Network, Guth an Phobail, has begun to document the area’s rich maritime heritage so the stories are preserved for future generations. It is an ongoing, online documentary project on the fishing industry and way of life told through the stories of local people who made their living from the sea.

The series of videos focus on the challenges that have faced, and continue to face, fishing communities like Greencastle. They tell individual stories of life at sea, be it on a fishing vessel or a merchant ship, and the development of onshore businesses dependent on the sea.

Jim Doherty, of Inishowen Community Media Network, will be in attendance to talk about the project. So far ICMN has recorded over five hours of interviews with local people and Jim hopes to widen his nets and create more interviews to be preserved for future generations. Jim will be showing extracts from his completed interviews and encouraging other families to get involved.

This season the museum is hosting an exhibition, on loan from the Fram Museum, in Oslo, about Roald Amundsen, the Norwegian explorer of polar regions who led the first expedition to reach the South Pole in 1911. The exhibition is based on the actual photographs taken on the journey to the Pole.

This exhibition has been supplemented by an exhibition on those Irishmen who voyaged to the Arctic and Antarctic oceans on the famous voyages of discovery and as part of their normal work in the Merchant Navy. There are exhibits of the artefacts they brought home with them. Find out why HMS ‘Terror’ arrived in Buncrana for repairs. Why is a member of the Lough Swilly lifeboat crew dancing around the South Pole in a Donegal team shirt?

Later in the year the museum will be organising traditional boat building session with McDonald boats when participants can actually see repairs being made to traditional boats.