Cabin Fever is an RTÉ reality TV show which was meant to have been broadcast over eight weeks starting on 3 June 2003.
Disaster struck however two weeks into the broadcast when, on Friday 13 June 2003, the ship ran aground off Tory Island off the north-west coast near County Donegal.
The show was named after cabin fever, the claustrophobic reaction that takes place when a person or group is isolated and/or shut in a small space, with nothing to do, for an extended period.
All the 9 remaining contestants1 and two crew were rescued by the nearby Arranmore Lifeboat, but the wooden sailing ship broke up on the rocks.
There is debris all over the water and all over the shore.”RTÉ and the programme makers, Coco TV, announced that all money earned from phone-in votes in the previous week (and which, due to the disaster, would not now lead to some contestant leaving the ship on 16 June as planned), would be donated to the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, which supplies lifeboat coverage around the Irish coast.
Barry Andrews, a politician from the then governing Fianna Fáil party, questioned "the wisdom of sending out 11 people with no sailing experience with just two qualified sailors."