Ireland doesn't have walruses. So this family was surprised when they found one

Alan Houlihan and his five-year-old daughter Mimi were walking on the beach when they spotted something out of the ordinary: a large, husked walrus.

Walruses are rarely ever seen in Ireland, let alone in Houlihan's neighbourhood along the southwest shore of Valentia Island.

The Houlihans went closer to watch the walrus from about 50 metres away. At that moment, the creature reached up out of the water and jumped up onto the rock.

"It did a party," Mimi told As It Happens host Carol Off. 

"It did a little dance for us," her father explained.

Houlihan called his wife and other kids to join them, as well as his friends who he thought would be interested in the fin-footed mammal.

"And then my phone kept ringing, didn't it? Everyone wanted to know where it was. One of my friends brought some teenagers. They started posting on social media, and it just went viral," he said. 

Houlihan and Mimi watched the walrus for two hours as it stayed put, laid out on the peninsula rocks.

"He was relaxing and having a sunbath, I think," Mimi said. "Yeah, he looked over, but he went scared. He just keep lying there. He's just covering his eyes and his mouth."

In sharing the news, Houlihan spoke with a marine biologist who thinks the walrus fell asleep on an iceberg and made its way down to Valentia Island from the Arctic Circle.

"I'd say what happened is he fell asleep on an iceberg and drifted off and then he was gone too far, out into the mid-Atlantic or somewhere like that down off Greenland possibly," Kevin Flannery, director of Dingle Oceanworld, told the Independent. "He would be pretty tired and pretty hungry at this stage."

Houlihan said the experience has been "quite unique."

"My father is a fisherman. I spent most of my young life fishing and diving and swimming, and I've never come across anything like it," he said. "I'd say it was just exhausted."

The Irish Whale and Dolphin group believes it is only the third sighting of a walrus in Ireland since 1999.

Another theory as to how the walrus navigated itself to Ireland involves a Russian fleet that is currently just off the coast. While floating on an ice floe, the walrus could have followed the factory ship and been fed whatever food they threw overboard.

Houlihan spoke with different wildlife experts in the region who reckon the walrus has since moved to the harbour.

He says he hopes the animal is having a "good feed" of the local fish "and getting his strength back to make his way back up to the Arctic Circle."

Written by Mehek Mazhar. Interview with Alan Houlihan and his daughter Mimi produced by John McGill.