George Palmer (1772-1853) was born into the family of an East India merchant and learned the sea from the bottom up, working through the ranks on his father's ships. In 1788, aged sixteen, he spent three days clinging to an upturned ship's boat after it capsized - a near-drowning that focused his mind on the problem of unsinkable lifeboats for the rest of his life. He joined the Royal National Institution for the Preservation of Life from Shipwreck (RNIPLS) in 1826, soon after its founding, and became one of its most important early figures, helping to design the lifeboats themselves. Elected MP for South Essex in 1836, Palmer pursued maritime reform through Parliament. His particular target was the timber trade: ships loaded so heavily with North American lumber stacked above the deck that they became top-heavy and capsized in heavy seas. His campaigning produced the Timber Ships Acts of 1840, 1842, and 1845.

And here is where things turned personal. In Parliament, Palmer's chief adversary in trade-policy debates was Daniel O'Connell, MP for Cork and uncrowned king of Catholic Ireland. The two men disagreed on much, but on timber ships they were unexpectedly on the same side. O'Connell could not resist needling Palmer with a joke - that the Liberator himself had done very well over the years from the wrecks of timber vessels driven ashore on his Kerry land. The remark was vintage O'Connell: half-joke, half-truth, calculated to remind everyone that wreck-rights on the County Kerry coast were a long-established part of estate income. The barb seems to have stuck. The establishment of a lifeboat station at Derrynane in 1844 - precisely on O'Connell's stretch of coast - may have been Palmer's quiet riposte. Build a lifeboat house at the Liberator's front door, and the joke about benefiting from wrecks loses some of its edge.

The original station opened in 1844 under the RNIPLS, with a boathouse on Derrynane Beach and an unnamed 26-foot lifeboat propelled by five oarsmen. The boat sat. And sat. The RNIPLS reorganised in 1854 to become the Royal National Lifeboat Institution; the Derrynane station passed into the new organisation's hands. No documented service, no recorded rescue, no surviving casualty list has emerged from the station's eleven years of operation. Whether this means no calls came or simply that the records have been lost, no one can now say. In any case, in 1855 - just a year after the RNLI took it over, and only eleven years after it opened - the station was closed. The boat went away. The lifeboat house, however, is still standing on the Mass Path above Derrynane Beach, now a private residence.

For nearly a century and a half after closure, this stretch of the Kenmare River had no local rescue boat. Then, in 1991, the drowning of a father and son who had set out from Ballinskelligs prompted local volunteers to revive the idea. The independent Derrynane Inshore Rescue station was established in 1995, operating from a new boathouse on the same Mass Path beside Derrynane Beach where George Palmer's original station had stood. Whatever the politics of 1844, the geography has stayed the same. Atlantic swell still meets the entrance of the Kenmare River, swimmers and yachtsmen still get into trouble in the bay, and Derrynane volunteers still launch from the strand to bring them home. Palmer's lifeboat house, peacefully residential now, still watches over both versions of the story.