An unidentified man, whose body was recovered from river Lee in Cork on July 23rd, 1999, carried this horseshoe medal which reads 'Good Luck MacGinty'.
Guards are open minded that this may be the man's surname.
However, the focus on those words obscures something far more compelling and potentially very useful in the image.
First lets rotate the image.
Zooming in now, to our new area of focus.
I spent quite a few days trying to figure out the best colour scheme to try read the writing and also to then make something of that inscription.
It didn't appear to make any sense, just random squiggles that looked like letters but didn't spell any words.
That is until I mirrored the image and saw the inscription is definitely written in English.
In order to see what's written on it, I tried countless approaches, colour schemes and filters (sepia, grayscale, hue, tilt-shift, solarize etc.) before settling on this one.
The first thing I noticed is the inscription says "J MacGinty", if you're viewing this on a laptop tilt your screen backwards until you see that more clearly.
It's inconclusive, open to interpretation and highly speculative but the word "Joe" may have been scratched on to the horseshoe at a later date. This is a reach and I'm nowhere near confident on this but it would be consistent with the initial.
There's many other details on the inscription - none of which are very clear - they appear to me to provide a signature (perhaps the engraver), a date and what looks like an address.
I tried to ignore the 3 big letters and focus on the smaller handwritten letters. Someone reading this may be more of a handwriting expert and figure out the entire sentence, for example the last 3 letters underlined in light blue looks to me to be "ing"
Authorities with physical access to the horseshoe should be able to assess the inscriptions and retrieve any information via eyeglass, that's if they're aware of the tiny inscription.
Of course it's hard to say if any of this information would be helpful or even if it was overlooked in the first place. It's possible the Guards know all about the inscription but I felt it's something that could have been overlooked in 1999.
The horseshoe itself could be relevant to his identity, or entirely irrelevant; it may just be something he picked up in a car boot sale.
Maybe this blog post was a waste of a few days but there is a small possibility that the answer to whether the horseshoe has any relevance may have been hiding in plain sight.
The photo of the horseshoe was released to the public, to participate in the search...
Maybe we just needed to pay closer attention to what's in front of us.
Given this man was homeless when he died, that seems a fitting sentiment to wrap up this post.
If we paid more attention to him when he was alive - talked to him, asked him how he was feeling, or if he wanted a cup of coffee or a sandwich - maybe we wouldn't be here 24 years after his death, still absolutely clueless as to who he was.
Maybe we didn't show him he mattered, walking past him when he was alive.
Maybe if homelessness itself was addressed and fewer people homeless, we wouldn't have had to.
One thing is certain, he was a part of a community in Ireland and his life mattered.
For now his name is simply 'a man who mattered'.
Rest in Peace.
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