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Mike Carney was born on the Great Blasket Island in 1920 in that unique, isolated Irish-speaking community. Mike left in 1937 to seek a better future in Dublin and eventually settled in Springfield, Massachusetts, with other former islanders. The death on the island of his younger brother set off a chain of events that led to its evacuation, in which Mike played a pivotal role. This is the story of his life and his efforts to promote Irish culture in America, to preserve the memory of The Great Blasket, to respect roots left behind and to set down roots in a new land. Written as Mike approached the age of 93, this memoir is probably the last of a long line of books written by Blasket Islanders. * Similar to: An Irish Navvy - the Diary of an Exile and The Hard Road to Klondike
A reprint of the Syracuse University Press edition of 1974.
* 'The Loneliest Boy in the World – he has only seagulls as playmates.' 1949 newspaper article * Gearóid Cheaist Ó Catháin had a unique childhood – he was the last child brought up on the Blasket Islands of Ireland's southwest coast. The nearest in age was his uncle who was thirty years older. In this affectionate memoir, Gearóid recalls growing up on the island without a doctor, priest, school, church or electricity. Despite public perception of this small, vulnerable fishing community, he remembers a wonderful childhood, cherished by parents and neighbours. His memories are entwined with the beliefs and customs handed down through the generations and are an insight into life on the Blaskets. He speaks with authority of the difficulties and challenges facing the final generation on the island. The Blaskets, with their deserted, crumbling cottages, will live on, in part due to the invaluable memories of the last child of the Great Blasket Island. • Also available: From the Great Blasket to America by Michael Carney
An account of life on the Blasket Island and on the island's eventual demise.
On an Irish Island tells the remarkable story of a remote outpost nearly untouched by time in the first half of the twentieth century, and of the adventurous men and women who visited and were inspired by it. In a love letter to a vanished way of life, Robert Kanigel brings to life this wildly beautiful island, notable for the vivid communal life of its residents and the unadulterated Irish they spoke well into the twentieth century. With the Irish language rapidly disappearing, Great Blasket became a magnet for scholars, linguists, and writers during the Gaelic renaissance. As we follow these visitors—among them John Millington Synge, author of The Playboy of the Western World—we are captivated both by the tiny group of islanders who kept an entire country’s past alive and by their complex relationships with those who brought the island’s story to the larger world.
Known affectionately as "the Queen of Gaelic Storytellers," Peig Sayers here offers reminiscences of the daily events that made up her life (such as seal catching, collecting turf for roofs, preparing for a funeral wake) alongside the tragedies of drownings at sea, pilgrimages, and the news of the 1916 revolution in Dublin City. It is a unique record of an essential part of the oral Gaelic tradition.
Island Cross-Talk, first published in 1928, was the first book to come out of the Blasket Islands, that remote, tiny community off the West Kerry coast speaking a dying language. In these pages from his diary, Ó'Crohan jotted down snatches of conversation, anecdotes, descriptions of the landscape and the sea.
This is the story of a boy's growing up on the Great Blasket, a sparsely inhabited, Gaelic-speaking island off the coast of Ireland. It tells of the simple life of a society that no longer exists, with a humor and poetry refreshingly remote from the modern world that replaced it.
Tomas O'Crohan's sole purpose in writing The Islandman was, he wrote, "to set down the character of the people about me so that some record of us might live after us, for the like of us will never be seen again." This is an absorbing narrative of a now-vanished way of life, written by one who had known no other.
The last King of the Great Blasket Island was Pádraig Ó Catháin, known as Peats Mhicí, who served for quarter of a century until his death in 1929. The King helped the islanders navigate through life and through national as well as international events, such as the 1916 Rising and the Great War. This book tells how he came to be King of the Great Blasket Island and how his personality and integrity shaped the role. This is the first account of the King's extraordinary life, written in collaboration with his descendants in the USA and Ireland. It tells the story of this unique man, his many contributions to the island and his extended legacy. • Also available: From the Great Blasket to America by Michael Carney and The Loneliest Boy in the World by Gearóid Cheaist Ó Catháin