Qualla: Passage West

Passage West: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit August Dominus, CC0. John Wesley came to Passage West in 1752 and was not impressed. The founder of Methodism rode down from Cork city to preach to the congregation gathered in the Market House and reported afterwards that they were 'as dull a congregation as I have seen.' What he could not have known was that the town he found dull would, in less than a century, become one of the most consequential industrial sites in nineteenth-century Ireland - the place where the first steamship built in Ireland was launched in 1815, where the SS Sirius set out in 1838 on the first steam crossing of the Atlantic from Europe, and where, in 1922, the Irish Civil War turned in the south on a beach landing of 1,500 National Army troops. Dull is not the word.

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Image: August Dominus | CC0

Passage West: Two Dockyards

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Valdoria~commonswiki assumed (based on copyright claims)., Public domain. The two dockyards made the town. Hennessy's yard, on the site of what is now Fr O'Flynn Park, launched the City of Cork in 1815 - the first steamship built in Ireland, a small wooden paddle vessel that began a tradition that would not finally die for over a century. The bigger of...

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Image: No machine-readable author provided. Valdoria~commonswiki assumed (based on copyright claims). | Public domain

Passage West: The SS Sirius

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit The Speckled Bird, CC BY-SA 4.0. On a April morning in 1838, the small paddle steamer Sirius cast off from Passage West under Captain Richard Roberts, headed for New York. Built originally for the Cork-London route, Sirius had been chartered at the last minute by the British and American Steam Navigation Company...

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Image: The Speckled Bird | CC BY-SA 4.0

Passage West: Civil War Landing

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dorothy Heaphy, CC BY-SA 4.0. On 2 August 1922, the Irish Civil War came to Passage West. Cork city, the second-largest urban area in the new Free State, was being held by Anti-Treaty IRA forces who had refused the Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921. The Free State government under Michael Collins decided to...

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Image: Dorothy Heaphy | CC BY-SA 4.0

Passage West: Trains, Resorts, Ferries

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jonathan Thacker, CC BY-SA 2.0. For roughly half a century Passage West was a tourist town. The Cork, Blackrock and Passage Railway, a narrow-gauge line that ran out from the city along the western shore of the harbour, opened its Passage station on 8 June 1850. The town became a popular Victorian sea-bathing d...

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Image: Jonathan Thacker | CC BY-SA 2.0

Passage West: The Suburb That Doubled

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dbee01, CC BY-SA 4.0. Passage West today is more bedroom community than port. Between the 1991 and 2011 censuses the town's population grew sixty percent, from 3,606 to 5,790. About half of all the private housing in the town was built in those twenty years. The N28 road south to Ringaskiddy, where th...

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Image: Dbee01 | CC BY-SA 4.0