President Mary McAleese named Ireland’s first Tamar class lifeboat at Kilmore Quay on 15 June.

The lifeboat was named Killarney, and was funded with the legacy of Mrs Mary Weeks from Surrey, who died in 2006. Mrs Weeks met her husband on a cruise off the west coast of Scotland, onboard a boat named Killarney. She was related to Coxswain Samuel Distin and lifeboat Crew Member Albert Distin, who were both lost at sea onboard the Salcombe lifeboat in 1916.

Speaking to a large crowd, including the Kilmore Quay Lifeboat Station volunteers and relatives of Mrs Weeks, President McAleese said: ‘Everything that is good about human nature is gathered on this day. All the good qualities; all the things that people are capable of doing out of goodness, generosity, love, kindness, care, concern; all gather around the naming of this boat this day.’ She praised Mrs Weeks’s ‘act of generosity to future people, complete strangers whom she would never know’.

President McAleese has been a good friend to the RNLI over her two terms in office and spoke movingly at our awards ceremony in 2004.