![]() Ó Catháin became a patron and represented the islanders on the Gay Byrne Show. In 1984 Ó Catháin got a call saying: "There's an ad in the Wall Street Journal: 'Blasket Island for sale'."Ī consortium soon had plans to build a luxury hotel there, and the Blasket Island Foundation was established in order to fight this development. The Land Commission had permitted the evacuees to keep their land, and in the 1970s an American investor began buying up parcels of it from them. We went to Mass, we knew our friends and relations, and apart from going to Dingle to sell our sheep or fish or wool, we didn’t mix much really.” We weren’t great mixers when we went to the mainland. ![]() For us as islanders, I suppose we didn’t really think about it, but we did stand out in the crowd. There’s complete silence on the Blasket Islands, and that total silence and peace and tranquillity that’s associated with these remote areas has a fascination for people. "I don't ever recollect my two grandfathers going to Dingle, which is just 30 or 40 miles away."ĭid he feel different from other people? “An islander is a different animal from a mainlander. "A lot of them just curled up and died after leaving," says Ó Catháin. He recalls how the men would still walk in single file, as they did on the cliffside paths on the island.īut the move was a shock for older islanders. Unquin, De Mórdha says they were well-known for their music and storytelling (“I often went to bed with the hairs standing up on the back of my head after listening to the stories”). When the islanders settled in their government-built houses in D They were getting old and the isolation started to get to a lot of them.” “A young man died the year before of meningitis, and the delay in going out in the coffin and burying him caused terrible problems. “There was no option but to leave,” says Ó Catháin. Shortly before his birth, the Great Blasket was visited by De Valera, and shortly afterwards the islanders sent him a panicked telegram: “Storm bound, distress, send food, nothing to eat.” This world was coming to an end by the time Ó Catháin was born, and the ageing islanders were finding survival increasingly difficult. If you consider that there were never more than 180 people on the island in modern times, it's extraordinary that we have a Blasket library consisting of 40 original books written by the people or the visitors." "Then, when the other islanders saw this old geezer there at the bottom of the village get away with writing about his life, they all said, 'Sure we all can do it', and it kicked off a literary avalanche. "When the scholars came they found the islanders spoke great literature and all they had to do was transfer that on to paper," says De Mórdha. Memoirs became the island's greatest export. It's one of the strange contradictions of the Blasket Island people that, while they were one of the most remote isolated communities in Europe, they were also, from the 19th century on, strongly connected to an international world of literature, linguistics and anthropology.Ī stream of scholars including Robin Flower, Carl Marstrander, George Thomson and Kenneth Jackson made their way there, drawn by the island's pure strand of Irish language and culture, and they encouraged islanders such as Peig Sayers, Micheál Ó Súilleabháin and Tomás Ó Criomhthain to write their life stories. “I said, ‘You haven’t looked at many Irish men.’ ” “Though we had a visitor who said it looked more like a pregnant woman than a man,” says Angela. So in the days before meeting him, I went to Dunquin, stared out at the wild, windswept islands, walked around the excellent exhibition at Blasket Centre, met its director, Micheál De Mórdha, and stayed in the B&B run by his wife, Angela.įrom their window there is a clear, blue-skyed view of Inis Tuaisceart, or the Dead Man, as it is known, because it looks like a man lying on his back. “I don’t know how many more days I’d try to go out there,” he said. He said the boat probably wouldn’t be sailing, and he was right: the seas were too rough. I initially asked to meet Ó Catháin in Dunquin in order to go out to the Blaskets with him. Another family in America wanted to take the whole family over." There was even an offer from a Texas rancher who wanted to adopt me, to buy me, in other words, which obviously sounded ridiculous to my parents. As time went on, more photographers came to the Blaskets and took photographs. "I got sent lots of letters and books and toys," he says.
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