For two years O'Brien sailed his small boat, the Saoirse, more than 30,000 miles across the world's southern oceans.
SINCE 2016, THE country has been celebrating various anniversaries of historical events from 100 years ago.
Although he was an aristocrat and received a private education, the Limerick native was also a grandson of the Young Irelander William Smith O’Brien, and took part in 1914 gunrunning with the Irish Volunteers. “The Saoirse would have been the first pleasure boat flying the tricolour to enter these ports and it was the first yacht to circumnavigate the world by way of the three Great Capes,” McMahon explained.
Despite the history-making voyage and O’Brien’s own documentation, his story hasn’t made much of an impact in Irish legend. And despite his gunrunning past, O’Brien apparently had no particular dislike for Britain, as evidenced by his enlistment in the British Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve during the First World War and in the Royal Navy’s Small Vessels Pool in the Second World War.
O’Brien, who was also a mountaineer known for climbing barefoot, had hoped to do some climbing there but arrived there too late in the year due to a delay with his sea voyage.
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