23 August 1170
Strongbow's beach
Richard de Clare, second Earl of Pembroke, landed at Crooke just south of Passage East on St Bartholomew's Eve, 1170. Two hundred knights, a thousand foot. He had been promised the daughter of the King of Leinster and half a kingdom in return for an army; he delivered the army. Within forty-eight hours Waterford had fallen and Aoife of Leinster had married him in the burning city. A year later Henry II followed with four hundred ships and made the whole thing official. Eight hundred and fifty years on, you can stand on the slip and watch a Volkswagen drive onto the ferry where the longships used to be.
1783, then 1798
Geneva Barracks and the Croppy Boy
New Geneva was meant to be a utopia. In 1782 a failed Genevan revolution sent watchmakers and printers into exile, and the Irish Parliament — flush with the brief confidence of Grattan's era — voted £50,000 to build them a town near Passage East. They were to bring their crafts and their republican habits to Waterford harbour. They lasted about a year before the project collapsed over governance. The half-built barracks were taken over by the army. In 1798, after the rebellion, it became a prison and a transportation depot. Thousands of croppies were held inside the walls; many were flogged, hanged or shipped to New South Wales. The song "The Croppy Boy" puts its dying narrator inside Geneva Barracks. The walls are still there, in a field a mile south of the village. There is no visitor centre. There probably shouldn't be.
Nine hundred years of crossing
The ferry
A ferry of some kind has been running between Passage East and Ballyhack since the twelfth century — first oared, then sailed, then steamed, now diesel. The current car ferry, run by the Passage East Ferry Company, started in 1982. It carries about 28 cars at a time, takes five minutes, and saves you roughly fifty kilometres of road through Waterford city if you are headed for the Hook peninsula. Sailings every fifteen minutes in the morning rush, then a shuttle the rest of the day. Closed Christmas Day and St Stephen's Day. That is the whole timetable in a sentence.
October 1171
Henry's four hundred ships
Strongbow's invasion alarmed the King of England enough to come over himself. On 17 October 1171, Henry II's fleet of four hundred ships dropped anchor at Crooke and Passage East — five hundred knights, four thousand men-at-arms, thousands of horses. The largest royal expedition to leave England in the medieval period landed on this stretch of harbour. He stayed six months, took the homage of every Irish king who would give it, and left the country a Lordship of England. None of which is on a sign anywhere here.