EIRE 80, Malin Head

The Coast Watching Service built 83 lookout posts around the Irish coast between 1939 and 1942, concrete huts where men in greatcoats logged what passed overhead and offshore. Beside many of them they laid the word EIRE in stone, whitewashed, large enough to read from a cockpit. The stated purpose was to tell a lost pilot he was over a neutral country and should not be fired on.

In 1943 something was added to that. At the request of David Gray, the United States Minister to Ireland, each sign was given a number, and charts matching the numbers to their positions were supplied to American aircrews. A pilot who saw EIRE now knew not just which country he was over but where on its coast he was.

The lookout post at Malin Head was number 80.

A neutral country's navigation grid

Ireland stayed out of the war and enforced its neutrality carefully enough that German and Allied airmen coming down on Irish soil were both interned. The numbering is one of the places where the shape of that policy shows: a neutral state quietly handing one side a coastal navigation aid.

The logbooks the watchers kept survive in the Military Archives in Dublin, night after night of what went past.

Lost, and found again

The signs then went out of public memory almost entirely. Grass and gorse grew over them. In 2018, after fires had burned back the hillside on Bray Head, a Garda Air Support Unit crew flying over found a sign nobody living in the area had known was underneath.

The Malin Head sign had faded by 2015, and visitors had taken to pulling stones out of it to spell their own names in the grass alongside. Malin Head Community Association had it restored, the work carried out under the local scheme and finished late that year.

Free, unstaffed, and open at any hour, though the stones only read properly in daylight. Park at Banba's Crown at the end of the R242 and walk about 5 minutes northwest past the 1805 signal tower; the letters are laid on the flat ground below it.

This is an exposed clifftop with no railings, several sections of the coastal path have eroded, and the wind here is the reason the place is famous. The car park is undersized for the traffic Malin Head now gets.

The approach road is narrow with passing places and is a poor choice in a motorhome. Nearest services are in Malin village to the south. Two more signs, numbers 81 and 82, survive further along the Inishowen coast for anyone who wants to make a run of it.