My wife's father,Mr Hugh Curran saw "the Spirit of St.Louis" when it flew over the southwest tip of Ireland enroute to Paris.Mr Curran died in 1998 but some years before he told me that as a young boy he was walking along a road near his house in Ballyferriter,Dingle,Co.Kerry when he heard a strange noise from the sky.To put this in context it is important to be aware of the remoteness and lack of knowledge/information of the (then) modern world that existed in western Ireland at the time.Mr Curran was then a young peasant boy and had never heard of aircraft.The previous day at school his teacher had told them a story from ancient Gaelic times of an eagle who would swoop from the sky and pluck up and carry away young children who had misbehaved. When Mr Curran heard the engine noise and turned around to see where it came from he saw a large "eagle" in the sky heading towards him.He was so terrified that he dived into a water filled ditch and cried as he thought the "eagle" had come to carry him off.He watched the aircraft head away to the south and some time later news eventually filtered through that a man had flown acroos the atlantic in a plane.
