A dozen British journalists will descend on the Dingle area today led by the chief feature writer with the London In- dependent, Cole Moreton. The hacks have been promised good and fresh local seafood, good stout and have been told that the accommodation will not be found wanting either. But why are they here?
It doesn't require any excuse from me to head for Dingle and its remote hinterland but this caught my interest. Who better to explain it all than Micheal de Mordha, director of the Blasket Island Centre in Dun Chaoin?
Here visitors come to find a better understanding of how life was lived on the Blaskets in the first place, how it waxed and how it waned.
Cole Moreton was smitten by the islands many years ago and has a long association with this part of Kerry going back for some decades. Like many before him, he was moved to write about the Great Blasket in particular.
His focus, though, was on the Kearneys - one of the Great Blasket families. This was his thesis and his study. In bringing it into print as Hungry for Home: Leaving the Blaskets, he has left us with an outsider's impression of that place and time.
He came to this part of the world as a 16-year old, fell in love with a local girl, and with the landscape as well. As a Londoner and an Eastender, it was the silence and topography as well as the girl that moved him. Nothing came of that relationship but his love for the area and the Blaskets blossomed. If you like, it's a love story without the girl.
The book is coming out soon. It should do well because at a time of upheaval on all fronts and the influx of foreigners to this State, it reminds us that the Blasket islanders also had to find a new home. For most of them, that was on the east coast of America. Cole Moreton has delved into it.
If the scare of leaving the island for a new life was formidable, before that some daunting truths visited the islanders and awakened them to a stark reality.
Meningitis is a scare that has not gone away. Regularly, bulletins from the Southern Health Board warn of the danger signals. Not a week ago, I was in the company of a parent and his son, a healthy youngster approaching his teens, who had been rushed to hospital because his parents saw the signs early. That made all the difference and the young lad survived. An hour later might have proved crucial, his parents were told.
I was told by Micheal de Mordha, in Dun Chaoin, the last parish before America, as they say in these parts, how meningitis led to the demise of island life on the Blaskets at a time when neither modern medicine nor the ability to move quickly was available to the ageing island population. That's where Moreton's book comes in.
It happened during the Christmas period of 1946 when 27-year-old Sean O Cearna, a son of the island, became violently ill.
There was at best a sporadic telephone link between the island and Dun Chaoin. Effectively, the island was cut off from the mainland and the atrocious weather at the time didn't help. No drugs, no doctors, no priests but with an islander in rapid decline, panic set in on the Great Blasket.
Things got worse. Over the Christmas period, without help from any quarter, Sean's condition deteriorated. January hadn't clocked up too many days when he died. The storms were still raging and it was impossible to get off the island. There wasn't even a coffin there.
The island tradition always was that with the exception of unbaptised children, suicides or dead shipwrecked sailors, who were buried in the small island graveyard known as An Ceallunach, islanders were buried on the mainland. No one knew that Sean had died of meningitis but everyone was aware of the tradition - his body had to be brought over to Dun Chaoin for burial.
A brief weather window allowed four islanders to make a dramatic crossing of the Blasket Sound - An Bealach - in order to alert the mainland to the tragedy and to the urgent need for the removal and burial of a body. A coffin had to be procured as well as the makings necessary for a good wake. These essentials were acquired mainly in Dingle but the weather had worsened once more and the four stalwarts who had made the dash across that sound in a light naomhog, couldn't get back. Eventually, the Valentia lifeboat was called in. It collected the coffin and brought it across to the Great Blasket. With the body on board, it returned to Dun Chaoin where Sean was buried. It could be said that this signalled the end of habitation on the Great Blasket.
All of this showed the islanders that the way of life could not be sustained. Sean O Cearna's death was a milestone and after that there was no going back.
It is astonishing how this island saga has captured the imagination. Remarkable too is the fact that a small outcrop on the western fringes of Europe produced a body of work in the Irish language that will remain with us and that it has lasting value in other languages still, even as the stonework in the old village on the island continues to decay. The English scholar, Robin Flower went there in 1910 - he was tagged what else but Blaithin by the islanders. He loved them and they returned the friendship. The Norwegian scholar, Carl Mastrander, urged him to learn Irish on the Great Blasket. This he did and later translated Tomas O Criomthain's classic, An tOileanach, into English. The island produced Peig Sayers, Muiris O Suilleabhain, author of Fiche Bliain ag Fas and other writers.