Drift-net salmon and a winding boat
The gandelow men
Coonagh's defining trade was salmon fishing in the Shannon estuary, worked from the gandelow - a long, narrow, flat-bottomed open boat built to slide over these shallow tidal flats and handle a drift net in a current. The racing of gandelows here is a tradition recorded as far back as 1864, and it has not died: Coonagh crews still race during Limerick's Riverfest, and in 2008 a Coonagh crew took the village's greatest rowing victory, winning the International Great River Race on the Thames in London. Moored gandelows and old fishing cabins still sit near the river by the tunnel - the living end of a working culture, not a re-enactment.
Coonagh brick, fired in clamps by the river
The town that built the town
The soft red brick in Limerick's Georgian streets - the terraces of Newtown Pery and the quay houses - was hand-made in Coonagh. Clay was dug from the fields (the pits are still called the Brick Holes), shaped by hand, stacked in temporary clamps and fired with whatever fuel was to hand, often leaving the imprint of straw on the finished brick. It was floated up the Shannon to the city docks. By the 1901 census only a single brickmaker was still listed across Coonagh East and West, and by the 1930s the trade had stopped entirely. The houses it built are still standing in town.
HMS Goliath, Gallipoli, 13 May 1915
Coonagh's war
Because they were boatmen, Coonagh's fishermen enlisted for naval service in the First World War in unusual numbers, and the village is said to have suffered one of the highest per-capita death tolls in the country. On 13 May 1915 the battleship HMS Goliath was torpedoed off Gallipoli; the dead included a cluster of Coonagh men - among them Thomas Davis and John Davis, Patrick and Maurice Cronin, Thomas Grimes and Michael Hickey. More were lost on minesweepers and drifters later in the war. For a village this size it is a staggering loss, and one that the place has not forgotten.
The floods of October 1961
The night it became an island
Coonagh has always lived with the river, but in October 1961 the river won. Floodwater rose across almost the entire low-lying townland, reaching several metres in places and cutting the village off as an island for a time. It is the kind of event that fixes itself in local memory and explains why so much of the older settlement clusters on the slightly higher ground of Coonagh West. The Shannon here is beautiful and it is not to be trusted.