New Statesman Scotland - Island lives of hardship and joy
The Great Blasket Heritage Centre is situated outside the small village of Dunquin on the Dingle Peninsula on the west coast of Ireland. Built with an extravagant amount of EU funding, it is all glass and white stone and, inside, airy as a cathedral. It is an irony that would not be lost on the island ghosts it overlooks - when those islands are not hidden by mist or rain - that such profligacy of material stands in stark contrast to what was their own threadbare existence.
The proof of this is not hard to find. Informative about island life the centre may be, but there is very little of material substance to view. What little the islanders had, they used till it was all used up: broken furniture became firewood; clothes were worn till they became rags or dishcloths. The hoardings are honest about this: "The islanders left very little of worth." Filling the centre is thus a kind of conjuring trick, using old black-and-white photographs and the islanders' own words.
Their words are indeed the island's most considerable legacy, for a few of them - Tomas O Crohan, Peig Sayers and Maurice O Sullivan - produced books which together form a small and geographically precise library that must be unique in world literature. The spur to it, Declan Kiberd makes clear in Inventing Irelands, came from the Irish nationalists' cultural interest in the gaeltacht. The purest form of Irish was spoken in the west - among people J M Synge described as "strange men with receding foreheads, high cheek-bones and ungovernable eyes. It is only in wild jests and laughter that they can express their loneliness and desolation."
In his memoir, The Islandman, the best known of these writers, Tomas O Crohan, gives a vivid portrait of the harshness of island life. Hunger was never far away; and where there was a possibility of augmenting your diet, you took it: if you suspected crabs lodged in a crevice, you stripped off and dived for them. In many ways, the vicissitudes of the islanders' experiences echo, unsurprisingly, those of the even more isolated St Kildans, whose men risked life and limb to catch fulmars, and whose women and children then plucked them till their fingers were raw: these are not pastoral lives to envy. Yet living so close to the elements, so close to the edge in every conceivable way, somehow imbued the language of the Blasket Islanders with an elemental power. When he first heard their Irish, the scholar George Thomson wrote: "It was as though Homer had come alive. Its vitality was inexhaustible. Yet it was rhythmical, alliterative, formal, artificial, always on the point of bursting into poetry."
Of course, when the scholars and the politicians discovered the Blasket, they were already fated to be elegised. A fascinating new book, Hungry for Home: leaving the Blaskets by Cole Moreton, charts the declining years of island life. It includes a touching letter which the islanders sent to de Valera in 1947 concerning their hardships: "You know well leader that there is a great privation here that no one could stand with 20 years only the islanders. If you can't help us, we will have to go across the Atlantic to seek our fortune."
In 1953, the island was finally evacuated and Moreton takes up the story of those islanders who voyaged across the Atlantic to seek a better life in "The Land of Youth". Moreton, an Englishman, makes use of a novelist's skills to draw closer to island experience ("A low moan is heard on the hillside, as the wind joins its voice to those of women keening by a deathbed."), yet the interest in his story, for me, falls away when he takes up the emigrants' trail. He finds a community of Blasket Islanders and their families living in Springfield, New England, under the godfatherly eye of Mike Carney (b Micheal O Cearna).
Theirs is the familiar emigrant story of adaptability, material success; both a romantic and a realistic view of "home". The fascination of the islanders' lives is perforce island-bound; and it is given its richest expression in O Crohan's books. It is here that we find human experience - youth, work, love, death - given clear, emblematic form, as in this description of joy from Island Cross-Talk:
"The fish were lifting their heads out of the water, the birds singing their music and on land the people were stripped to their shirts, re-earthing the potatoes. Groups were coming down both sides of the hill with bundles of furze and children raced east along the slope after morning school. Smoke was rising from every house at this time - dinner on the way surely."
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
