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A View North The last, sad gasp of Gaelic island culture

February 16, 2011

By Staff Reporter

By Jack Holland

Years ago, when I was a young boy, I remember standing on a side street in Belfast, looking up at the great mill chimney as it belched smoke and as all the smaller chimneys on the row houses around it poured their fumes into the murky air. I remember thinking: "Is this really the same country as the Blasket Islands?"

You see, I had just been reading a copy of "Twenty Years A-Growing," Maurice O’Sullivan’s classic account of life on the Blasket Islands off the northwest coast of Kerry in the early years of the last century. The contrast between his description of that Gaelic world of wind and wave and what I saw in front of me was so startling that I could not conceive of one country, one nation, or one unit of any sort, political or geographical, holding the two within its compass. And yet, Ireland did. Now, both the Gaelic island culture and the Victorian industrial culture have vanished from Ireland, more or less.

I was reminded of my youthful ruminations about the coexistence of the two when I picked up a copy of "Hungry for Home. Leaving The Blaskets: A Journey From the Edge of Ireland." by Cole Moreton (due to be published by Viking Press this July).

Moreton is an English journalist who has told the poignant story of the last days of Blasket Island life, its break up and evacuation in 1953. He has traced the journey to America that many Blasket Islanders made on abandoning their precarious existence and has interviewed those that survive, here and in Ireland, recording their memories of almost 50 years ago. He has also recounted something of the history and folklore of the Greater Blasket, which, remarkably for such a small patch of windswept rock, five miles long and about half a mile wide, has produced three classics in the Gaelic language in the last 100 years.

I am sure that no one who has read the English translation of O’Sullivan’s memoir, first published in 1933, can ever forget the opening lines:

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"There is no doubt but youth is a fine thing though my own is not over and wisdom comes with age.

"I am a boy who was born and bred in the Great Blasket, a small truly Gaelic island which lies north-west of the coast of Kerry, where the storms of the sky and the wild sea beat without ceasing from end to end of the year and from generation to generation against the wrinkled rocks which stand above the waves that wash in and out of the coves where the seals make their home."

The English novelist E.M. Forster in his introduction to the English version compares it to "the egg of a sea-bird — lovely, perfect, and laid this very morning." He notes that it is an account of a very ancient world, a culture which contained songs, legends and poems, some of which may well be older than "Beowulf" (the 9th century Anglo-Saxon epic which has recently been translated by Seamus Heaney.)

The beginning of Moreton’s account takes place in one of those storm’s referred to by O’Sullivan. The date is Christmas Eve 1946 and it is the beginning of the end for the Blasket islanders.

"The air is full of a terrible wailing," Moreton writes. "A gale scalps the waves, spilling foam. Gulls shriek as they tumble, caught between the spray, the rain and the low, dark clouds. A mountain stands in the sea, its back breaking the wind so that the invisible forces are scattered over its slopes. . . . A dozen decaying cottages huddle into the hillside, each long and low and built of stone upon stone, each with a bolted door. The wind worries the roofs, ripping back felt, and animals sheltering in outhouses bellow and moan in fear."

Only a handful of families, comprising some 50 souls, still live on the Greater Blasket, the last of the small group of islands to support human life.

Sean O Cearna is killing a sheep for the Christmas feast when one of his sons, 24-year-old Seainin, collapses. He sickens over the coming days, casting a pall over the Christmas celebrations. The islanders have no telephone. There is no doctor. No boat can cross to the mainland, over three miles away across the tempestuous waves. It is some 15 miles to the nearest hospital. The one radio telephone on the island is broken, as was often the case. The people are stranded and helpless as the young man dies, stricken with meningitis. According to Moreton, the death of Seainin broke the will of the islanders forever.

They wrote to Eamon de Valera, then taoiseach, describing their plight and asking to be evacuated to the mainland. Dev comes to visit them on his ship in July 1947, to hear personally what they have to say. Dev listens sympathetically, remembering the days when he was on the run and the islanders hid him for a time. But it would take another six years for their request to be granted.

Moreton has clearly fallen in love with this island and its people, and his book shows it. He tracks some of the O Cearna family to Springfield, Mass., where many of them settled, and listens attentively as they try to recapture, through memory, that lost world. He then returns to the island itself, and the book ends with the author standing in the old cottage of the O Cearna’s, meditating among the ruins.

Since Edward Gibbon sat among the tumbled stones of the old Roman forum and contemplated the fate of empires, Englishmen seem to have had a penchant for this. Moreton is part of a rich tradition. His book is a worthy addition to it.

But the last word should be with O’Sullivan, on his return home after moving to in Galway to become a garda, and just three years before the last islander leaves: "There was a great change in two years — green grass growing on paths for lack of walking; five or six houses shut up and the people gone over to the mainland; fields which had once fine stone walls around them left to ruin; the big red patches on the Sandhills made by the feet of the boys and girls dancing — there was not a trace of them now.

"When I returned home the lamps were being lit in the house. I went in. My father and grandfather were sitting on either side of the fire, my grandfather smoking his old pipe."

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