Maroon

Tramore Trá Mhór = the big strand  is really not wheelchair accessible. It has been a resort and holiday destination since the 19thC but the houses are mostly perched on ledges up the bluff which marks the West end of the long sandy beach. Half the streets require a steep trudge uphill, unimaginable to negotiate if pushing a wheelchair. There has also been a silent war as new houses struggle for a coveted sea view: which inevitably occludes someone else's. On a couple of occasions, we've 'taken' a recently refurbished upside-down house where the entrance and living room are under the roof and the bedrooms on two floors further down the cliff-face. One result of this design is an enormous picture window overlooking a)a steep ginnel of 19thC fisher-cottages b) the dodgems and other amusements c) the full length of The Prom d) the full sweep of the beach e) Brownstown Head beyond:

On the last morning of October, I woke before dawn and fossicked about making a pot of tea. The quiet was shattered by a distant explosion, followed a minutes later by another. My assessment was "maroon" the rocket that goes up to summon enough people to man the life-boat for a 'shout'. This was informed by my experience living in a garden flat [whc prev] opposite the East Pier in Dun Laoghaire in 1975. In those days, a maroon was still the standard way of calling a crew - as it had been in 1875. In some senses 1975 is recognisably the same as now: television, washing-machines, Manchester United, 747 Jumbo jets, baked beans. But comms have changed utterly: in the 1970s you could wait 5 years to have a telephone line installed . . . five months if you were a doctor or the apparatchik of a political party. Our Dun Laoghaire flat had a shared payphone in the hall but most ordinary homes didn't -- hence the broadcast-by-rocket call to oars for the RNLI.

Nowadays crews are mustered by txt or WhatsApp; so my explanation of the pre-dawn explosion in Tramore is a hopeless anachronism. All was revealed over the next 4 minutes when I clocked a series of star-burst rockets going up from the far end of the Prom followed 1.second later by the >!BANG!<. It is illegal to import, hold, sell or use any other fireworks without a licence: specified in Section 80 of the Explosives Act 1875, as amended by the Section 68 of the Criminal Justice Act 2006. I guess the perps had calculated how long of a pyrotechnic interval they had before the Gardai could send a cruiser from the barracks just uphill from our AirBnB.  The same evening the Dublin Fire Services handled +500 emergency medical call-outs. But bonfire collateral damage was less than usual for Halloween because material got a good hosing from torrential rain the previous night