The Great Blasket was always known simply as the Island, or the Western Island, or the Great Island, while the other islands were the Lesser Blaskets.įrom the end of the 13th century, the Ferriter family leased the islands from the Earls of Desmond, and from Sir Richard Boyle after the dispossession of the Desmond Geraldines at the end of the 16th century. ![]() Indeed, the Blaskets have always been an intrinsic part of Dunquin. By the time she actually had ‘one foot in the grave and the other on its edge,’ she was living in a nursing home in Dingle, where she died at the end of 1958, when I was almost 7, and she was buried not on the Blasket Islands but on the mainland in Dunquin.įreed from the myths about Peig Sayers and memories of her morose memoirs, I was able to have a fresh view of the Blasket Islands and Dunquin last week. I was surprised to realise that she was still alive when I was born. She was born in Vicarstown, Dunquin, she was educated in English, she was illiterate in Irish, she spent her first working years in Dingle, and she was only in her mid-50s when the stories in Peig were recorded by Robin Flower, who gave her the voice of an old and dying woman. The other Blasket islanders we were expected to read, or to know about, included Muiris Ó Súilleabháin, author of the autobiographical Fiche Blian ag Fás (Twenty Years a-Growing), and Tomás Ó Criomhthain, who wrote An tOileánach (‘The Islandman,’ 1929), satirised by Flann O’Brien as An Béal Bocht (‘The Poor Mouth’).īut as we headed out the Dingle Peninsula last week, we were reminded that Peig was neither from the Blasket Islands, nor did she die there. ![]() Had I known in advance half, or even one-third, of what the future had in store for me, my heart wouldn’t have been as gay or as courageous it was in the beginning of my days.’ I have experienced much ease and much hardship from the day I was born until this very day. The oft-bleak tone of the book begins with the very opening words: ‘I am an old woman now, with one foot in the grave and the other on its edge. Her book Peig depicts the declining years of a traditional, Irish-speaking way of life characterised by poverty, devout Roman Catholicism, and folk memories of gang violence, the Great Famine, and the Penal Laws. It was only later in life that I learned that she never wrote the book, and that she dictated her reminiscences to others, who redacted and edited them. ![]() I cannot blame my negative teenage views of the Irish language on Peig Sayers … but she did nothing to leave me with a positive view of a language that was foreign to me, despite an increasing interest in the Irish language at the time of the fiftieth anniversary of the 1916 Rising.Īnyone of my age who was a schoolboy in Ireland in the 1950s and the 1960s has memories of Peig Sayers (1873-1958) and her autobiographical memoir Peig. And until I spent the summer of 1966 in Ballinskelligs in the Kerry Gaeltacht, I was on course to fail the ‘Inter Cert’ exams in Irish – and so I was on course too to failing the full exams and to finding myself on the way to school in England. Her books were part of the reading list on the Irish-language courses. The Blasket Islands seen from Slea Head (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2017 click on image for full-screen view)Īs a schoolboy, Peig Sayers were the bane of my life.
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