Ní Shúilleabháin is chronicling a world and a culture in death's throes in Perhaps the most powerful hymn to the Great Blasket is a work by another woman – Eibhlís Ní Shúilleabháin. To one collector alone she passed on 375 tales. Peig Sayers's memory was stuffed full of stories, myths and local tales. Muiris Ó Súilleabháin, of the next generation, wrote inįiche Bliain ag Fás (Twenty Years A-Growing)of what it was like to leave the island behind forever. In November 1953, after five and a half years of government deliberation and repeated pleas from islanders, this stark, treeless beauty was evacuated.Īt the turn of the last century scholars flocked to study the island, where the people spoke a form of Irish not heard elsewhere for centuries and gathered by firelight to hear stories that had been passed down through generations. Dev sent a boatload of food, reportedly packed a few bottles of warming spirits and appointed a commission to find a solution for the island. It prompted islanders to send a notorious telegram to the taoiseach: “de valera dublin – stormbound distress send food nothing to eat – blaskets”. Just months later the Great Blasket was again isolated by a storm that lasted for days. The death of a local boy, Seainín Ó Cearna, in 1946 from meningitis helped finally to break islanders’ will. Nobody has lived on the Great Blasket, which is inaccessible for great swathes of the year, for more than half a century. "Seen from above you would think them sea-monsters of an antique world languidly lifting time-worn backs above the restless and transitory waves," wrote the scholar Robin Flower in The double hump of An Blascaod Mór, the Great Blasket, is the biggest island in the fragmented archipelago off the desolate grandeur of Slea Head, in Co Kerry. Beyond you drop off the edge of the world. Great Blasket's delights are simple, such as walking and swimming, but you can't escape memories of a vanished people, writesĪN ANCIENT people living at the end of the earth.
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