Paddy Hart - the whaler from Pearse St.

With all the Christmas and my inter-continential shenanigans last month, I never re-posted this article I wrote over on the Greenpeace Making Waves blog

Last week, I had the pleasure of meeting the wonderful Paddy Hart, a Dublin-born, Australian ex-whaler. "What is going on?", you may well ask. "Is Greenpeace now consorting with whalers?". Note that I said "ex-whaler" - Paddy was in Tokyo, Japan to support Junichi and Toru - the Tokyo Two, to ask Prime Minister Aso to quite whaling, and to reassure Japan's whalers that there is life after whaling. Naturally, if you put two Irishmen together, you'll never get us to shut up, so I spent a few days hearing of Paddy's adventures over the years (and I told a few shaggy dog yarns myself). As well as being a great storyteller, Paddy was the skipper and harpoonist of a whaling vessel in Albany, Western Australia, in the 1970s until public opinion and economic rationale closed down the Cheynes Beach Whaling Company - the last whaling operation in the English-speaking world.

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