The Army Reorganisation Scheme of January 1939 approved the establishment of the Coast Watching Service. In late April 1939, Minister for Defence Frank Aiken approved posters calling for 800 volunteers to join the new service. Volunteers were to be aged between 17 and 50 years, residing in ‘Maritime Districts’ and ‘willing to serve in this arm of the National Defences’, a suitably neutral term given the difficult position of naming the armed forces in Ireland.  It was hoped that volunteers would be fishermen, boatmen, those with farms by the seashore, in short, any suitable candidates who as part of their day-to-day business were involved in seafaring. What made the Coastwatching work was its very simplicity, it was a local information gathering network where each link in the chain covered a small specific area and had a limited number of tasks to perform.  The Coastwatchers were at their post 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and provided a standard format of information that could be logged and relayed to Dublin.  A routine everyday information flow, even of relatively low-grade data, to G2 (Directorate of Military Intelligence) and Air Defence Command HQ built up an elaborate picture of the conflict around and over Ireland during the Second World War. Head of G2, Colonel Liam Archer, who was later to become Defence Forces Chief of Staff, attached ‘the greatest importance’ to information from the Coast Watching Service.’

The Coastwatchers underwent considerable hardship while on duty. Volunteers from LOP63 told stories “of the hardships endured there, climbing hand over hand along a rail with howling gales bashing their faces with rain or sleet as well, climbing up to their post”. In the winter, LOPs were cold and wet, with the fires in their tiny grates providing little warmth. LOP63 was one of the most exposed locations.

The truth was, that by selecting local mariners, fishermen, beachcombers and those with farms along the coast, the military acquired a specialist group with a pre-existing “detailed knowledge of a given section of the coastline”. This was the sort of knowledge that only a lifetime of seafaring could give and which barrack training could not easily provide. G2 appreciated the skills of their volunteers along the coast, as one memorandum put it, these men combined “an extensive knowledge of the peculiarities of the coast in the vicinity of their posts with a reasonably good appreciation of the different types of seagoing craft”.   Living locally, the men of the Coast Watching Service knew what craft were expected to operate in the vicinity of their posts and once in operation, the Coast Watching Service ensured that “under normal conditions of visibility no surface craft can approach our coast unobserved at any intermediate point between LOPs ”. By the end of the Second World War the opinion in the Department was that the Coastwatchers work had been invaluable. 

All sightings were reported by telephone to a more senior authority, from local Garda to recipients such as a local Military Post, Command Headquarters or Air Defence Command. The telephone was the most immediate means of communication available to each LOP. It was installed in most LOPs by mid-1940. Telephones were a relatively new form of technology in many isolated parts of Ireland at that time. Coastwatchers had to be trained how to use the telephone as it was not a commonplace object in households. The equipment was primitive, prone to failure and could easily be put out of operation by adverse weather conditions.