Message turns up after 20 years

Callum Lavery

A NORTHSIDE woman has her own message in a bottle story after having a note she wrote 20 years-ago returned to her. 

Harmonstown local Christina Behan was shocked when she received a message on Facebook claiming to have found the note written by her when she was seven-years-old. 

The message in the bottle included Christina and her brothers’ names and ages, their address, and the date the note was written: April 25th 1999.

Christina originally cast the bottle into the sea at Dollymount beach, only for it to be found 20 years later near Bull Island.

Christina barely remembers sending the note but was over the moon to have it returned to her. 

“I hardly even remember doing it, I was seven at the time,” she told Northside People. 

“It was almost 20 years later so I just thought that as great. I like to think it went all around the world and came back to Dollymount where it was sent from.

“I just thought it was brilliant, all these years later and it got back to me. God knows where it has been after all these years. I think it is very exciting.”

Christina was very grateful to Raheny residents Ruth and Ian Metcalf for returning the bottle to her. 

“I thought that was lovely, someone else would have picked it up and thrown in it in a bin I’m sure,” she said. 

“And they even brought it back and left it into the house for me and I thought that was lovely.”

Christina is planning to send out a new message with her own daughter. 

“Ah yeah definitely,” she said. 

“I have my own baby now at this point, I could do it for her.”

The finder of the bottle, Ian Metcalf, said he found the message while walking with his son on the beach.

“My wife and I have a young boy, he’s 15-months-old and we take him for a walking in the morning and the afternoon for his naps,” said Mr Metcalf. 

“We live near the causeway at Bull Island so we quite often walk him down there and I pick up bits of litter on the way.

“I picked up this bottle on the causeway. It had been very windy the day before so I think the bottle must have been blown up because it was basically on the grass beside the path and noticed the note inside.

“We thought it was quite interesting and we could actually read it through the bottle before we opened it.  We saw that it said Dublin 5 on it, and originally we thought it hadn’t gone very far. 

“But when we opened it up and saw the date on it we thought: wow, it’s been 20 years.”