A Gathering on the Blaskets: an islandman returns

Peig. There’s a whole generation of Irish schoolchildren for whom that name was insult added to injury. It was bad enough that you couldn’t get your Leaving Cert unless you passed your Irish paper, without having to wade through the mind-numbing reminiscences of some old biddy with “one foot in the grave and the other on the edge of it”.

The book was required reading for the Leaving Cert until the 1990s. Hatred of it extended to loathing for Peig herself, and it’s a legacy that’s stuck. You have only to type “Peig Sayers” into a search engine to find extraordinary levels of aggression still aroused by her name.

In 1953 Sayers was among the 22 remaining inhabitants of the Great Blasket Island evacuated by the government to the mainland Dingle Peninsula. Life on the island had become unsustainable. The majority had left for America, those who remained were ageing, and women were increasingly unwilling to marry into a life of hard work, isolation and grinding poverty.

Up to the point of evacuation, the Blasket community had retained a particularly pure form of the Irish language and unbroken links with an oral heritage that the classical scholar George Thompson believed to be as old as, and comparable to, that of Ancient Greece.

It included an earthy humour that contemporary Ireland found hard to reconcile with the islanders’ deep sense of spirituality, which was largely expressed – by the time Thompson got there – as devout Roman Catholicism.

Inevitably, the fact that the islanders’ cultural inheritance was both oral and bound up with isolation and self-sufficiency meant that evacuation threatened its survival. In fact, had English academics Thompson and Robin Flower and Norwegian professor Carl Marstrander not visited the island in the early part of the 20th century, even the memory of the islanders’ inheritance might have been lost.

Instead, in their last years on the Great Blasket and later on the mainland, the community produced an extraordinary collection of books, one of which was Peig . Inspired by Thompson and Flower, dictated, edited and translated with their help and that of other visitors, the books were published with support from writers such as the novelist EM Forster, who wrote the foreword to The Islandman , the first of the island memoirs, by Tomás Ó Criomhthain.

It was a conscious effort by the islanders to preserve Ireland’s past for its future, and they were fully aware of the irony and complexity of a situation in which duty to their oral culture demanded that they turn to writing.

Now, more than 80 years after The Islandman 's publication and 60 years after the evacuation, the latest memoir of a native islander has been published. A few weeks ago I sat in an office in the Blasket Island Centre in Dún Chaoin listening to its 93-year-old author, Mike Carney, who was talking by phone from his home in Springfield, Massachusetts.

Although Carney was only 16 when he left it, his emotional connection to the island has never been lost. All it lacked, he says, was investment. "[Éamon] de Valera visited in 1947. We'd written letters to say we needed help. There wasn't a pier. Politicians talk a lot but talk's cheap. We needed action."

Matters of life and death
Carney's 24-four-year old brother Seán had died of meningitis on the island. "The weather was bad and they couldn't get a doctor. The one phone the government gave us hadn't been working for a week."

Three islandmen battled gales in a naomhóg or currach to fetch a coffin from the mainland. They carried it over the mountain from Dingle to Dún Chaoin, the last village at the end of the peninsula, but the weight of the coffin and the rough seas made it impossible to get back to the island.

Seán’s dead body lay for three days on his father’s bed. When the body reached the mainland, cause of death had to be determined. The trauma of that experience still resonates in Carney’s memoir. “My father told them to write down that the government killed him. He was very angry. So was I.”

That anger, and fear for the island’s ageing population, drove Carney to write his own letter to de Valera asking why, if the government valued the language, it failed to support the way of life of the people who preserved it. By then, given government inertia, the decline of the fishing industry, and continuing depopulation, he’d came to believe that evacuation was the only answer.

Today, from his home in the US, he continues to work with others to preserve the islanders’ legacy. Why? “So it can be living when I’m dead.”

But perhaps there’s a lesson to be learnt from the decision to foist Peig’s edited reminiscences on a generation of readers who, in most cases, had no sense of the struggling communities she described.

To insist on the value of her book without its context could be as foolish as presenting the Dingle peninsula today as a cultural tourism destination without also supporting it as a diverse, living community. Culture without context becomes meaningless; oral culture without its language dies.

In 1987, Carney was instrumental in setting up Fondúireacht an Bhlascaoid, the Blasket Island Foundation, a private non-profit organisation "to keep the spirit of the island alive and promote its memory".

The island remains uninhabited. It’s often lost in mist. Then, as clouds shift, it appears again on the horizon like Hy-Brasil, its dark cliffs blazing like polished pewter. Facing it, the Blasket Centre houses an archive of audiovisual and print material about the islands, conference and exhibition facilities, a book shop and a café.

The Islandman statue stands hunched and straining against the Atlantic wind, his low-crowned hat clutched to his head and his stone coat streaming behind him.

Money for the centre’s feasibility study was raised by the foundation; the building was government-funded and opened in 1994. The foundation holds an annual commemoration conference there, and runs a scholarship programme for those who come from the Dingle peninsula.

From this Thursday until May 29th, it’s hosting a Gathering event, which will include the launch of Carney’s memoir, co-written with his son-in-law Gerald Hayes. There’ll be music, mutton pies, lectures and horse racing and, at 93, Mike plans to revisit the island, “if the weather’s right and they get me a boat or a helicopter”. As a child he was once given a shilling by a visitor, and hid it between two stones at the gable end of the house. “I might see if it’s still there.”