Our Like Will Not Be Seen Again
A community of never more than 150 people on an island off Kerry produced three books still in print seventy years later — and was evacuated by the state in 1953 because there was no way to reach a doctor.
On 17 November 1953 the Irish government took the last twenty-two residents off Great Blasket Island and settled them on the mainland, three miles away and visible from the beach. The island had no doctor, no priest and no reliable way to reach either in a winter storm. A young man had died the previous winter waiting for a boat.
Before that happened, a community of never more than about 150 people produced three books that are still in print seventy years later, in a language that at the time was thought to be dying. That is the strange fact about the Blaskets, and it did not happen by accident.
Why the books exist
Scholars came to the island in the early twentieth century because the Irish spoken there was old, unbroken and unmixed with English — a laboratory for linguists from Norway, Sweden and England. They stayed, they learned, and they told the islanders that what they knew was worth writing down.
Tomás Ó Criomhthain wrote An tOileánach. Muiris Ó Súilleabháin wrote Fiche Blian ag Fás. Peig Sayers dictated hers because she could not write, and a generation of Irish schoolchildren was made to study it until the book became a national joke — unfairly, because the woman was a formidable oral storyteller and the format did her no favours.
Ó Criomhthain ended his book with a line every Irish reader knows: our like will not be seen again. He was right, and he knew it while it was still happening.
What is there now
Houses without roofs, a path, sheep, and in summer a small number of visitors brought over by boat from Dunquin. There is a café and there are two caretakers in the season. There is no electricity worth the name and no shop.
The crossing depends entirely on the sea and cancels often — the sound between the island and the mainland is one of the more difficult stretches of water on the Irish coast, which is precisely the point of the 1953 evacuation. If the boat does not run, the visitor centre at Dunquin is genuinely good, and the view of the island from Slea Head is the one on every postcard of Kerry.
The wider pattern
The Blaskets were not unique. The Irish Atlantic is dotted with islands evacuated between the 1930s and the 1970s — the Inishkeas, Inishark, Inishmurray — each for the same accumulation of reasons: no medical care, emigration hollowing out the young, and a state that found it cheaper to move people than to serve them where they were.
The islands still inhabited — the Arans, Tory, Clare Island — stayed inhabited because of ferries, electricity and, eventually, tourism. That is the argument the west of Ireland has been having with itself for a century, and it is worth knowing about while standing on a cliff looking at an empty village.