The Great Blasket Island off the coast of Kerry was in the news recently following revelations of the strange superstitions surrounding pregnancy and birth on the island in the early days of this century. You can generally rely on Kerry for a good story when all else fails. The piseoga, revealed by folklorist Dr Padraig O Healai in the Women's Studies Review, involved whistling during sex, the sprinkling of stale urine over new mothers and babies, and the ever-present danger of fairies.
The whistling business featured in the advice given by Meini, the Blasket midwife of the time, to the noted scholar and original "Blaskethead" Robin Flowers: "The next time you are about your business with your wife," she told Flowers, "whistle and you will have a son." It is thought that she added "You know how to whistle, don't you? Just put your lips together and blow", but the manuscript has faded to the point of illegibility.
Robin Flowers later wrote to Meini from England to say that the advice had worked, and from that day on there was no stopping the woman on Great Blasket island: Meini instantly became a "made woman", or "bean deanta" in the rich Italo-Irish dialect of the time.
These are only a few tantalising details concerning the richness of Kerry sexuality, and the emergence of the county in the forefront of the Irish sexual revolution.
Apart from her work as a midwife, Meini was the leading agony aunt on the island, with people coming for advice from far and wide. With the Great Blasket measuring only about one mile by a half, they didn't actually come from all that far or wide, but Meini had a stranglehold on piseoga and that was that.
For example, shy young men would ask how they might make their intentions known to the cailini oga they fancied. Meini would often advise a daring strategy which involved high-risk physical manoeuvres, and which became known as the "Dingle Pass". Similarly, a young man initially repulsed by a young woman would be urged not to lose courage but to try and try again: the famous "Killarney Rally" technique.
Meanwhile, young islanders seeking to impress girls financially, which was not easy in a small basket-making economy, were urged by Meini to "do the Lakes". The young men would then head for the Killarney area to spin tales to visiting Americans, often making enormous fortunes from foolishly generous tips.
Sometimes, however, the young man who "did the Lakes" would forget all about the dark-haired beloved back on the Great Blasket and instead hie himself and his new-found fortune off to California, usually with one of the blonde American visiting females, who were quite shameless in this regard. For this reason, "doing the Lakes" fell out of favour among the womenfolk of Great Blasket. In later years the women happily drowned any man caught even thinking about it.
When it came to influencing the sex of the child, Meini would advise some of the married men to have intercourse on alternate days, some every day, some every third day, some on the first Wednesday before the full moon, some on the second Thursday afterwards, and nearly all twice on Sundays. (The word "ovulation" had not yet entered the Irish language, and Meini was determined it never would).
The islanders' wives were also privately advised to have sex on "the other" day - an la eile. (Hence the later phrase, "a bit of the other"). Naturally some exhaustion resulted from this complicated advice, with Meini trying to cover all angles ("na hanglai go leir"). But generally speaking half the children born were male, and a 50/50 result was always considered a fair outcome on the Great Blasket, and indeed greater Kerry, even before the rise of the GAA.
There was a dark side too. (There always is on islands). It would sometimes happen that a young Blasketman would claim to have had no influence at all on the birth of a child, never mind its sex, and deny on oath having ever been anywhere near the mother-to-be, or even having ever seen the girl. This was not always a credible claim on an island where only about 27 people lived, and not only knew what everyone else had for breakfast, but often cooked it too.
In these cases Meini often quietly advised a fairly desperate folk remedy called the "Tarbert Ferry". How the young man first got off the Great Blasket, before word spread through the community, was his own problem.
Those who didn't drown were often hotly pursued by currach to the mainland, while the young men in flight were jocularly said to be "at the Listowel Races".
This could become a matter of grave insult even years later when an islander, perhaps the worse for the demon drink (an Deabhal deoch) might taunt another man by saying it was "well-known that your father was at the Listowel races".