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The history of Clare Island is as visible and tangible as the veins and lines in the skin of an old person. The entire island is furrowed with lazy beds, the potato beds that betrayed our ancestors so cruelly. The lazy beds ripple across the fields, up mountainsides and along the shoreline. They are as integral a part of the landscape of Clare Island as the square castle that sits at the entrance to the perfect half-moon harbour, once the home of Granuaile, the pirate queen of Connaught.

In the mid-19th century, there were 1,600 people living on Clare Island, which lies in Clew Bay, off the Mayo coast. Today there are less than 150, a figure which is apparently proportionally the same as the wider statistics of depopulation for the entire island of Ireland since the Famine.