Politics
People from the island were not very involved in the Irish political movements. The primary struggle that people on the island were involved in was the day-to-day battle with the weather.
The older people sometimes talked politics in the evening. But I was young when I lived on the island and I wasn’t interested in political issues yet.
The islanders were all in support of the total unification of Ireland. My father very much wanted to see all the thirty-two counties of Ireland as one independent country. People used to say, ‘England’s troubles are Ireland’s opportunities.’ I used to hear that expression all the time.
Dunquin
Dunmore Head is the closest point to the island on the mainland, only about three-quarters of a mile away. But there are huge cliffs and it is much too steep for a landing area. The closest mainland pier to the island is in the small village of Dunquin at the tip of the Dingle Peninsula, about 3 miles from the island.
The pier in Dunquin (An Fhaill Mór) has always been very hazardous. It had a good cement landing place, but the road up from the pier was like walking up Croagh Patrick. It is steep and paved with cobblestones. It is a narrow winding road that bends around and around like a spiral as it climbs the cliff. In my day, Dunquin had a small shop named Fitzgerald’s where islanders could buy a few necessities, a post office, and St Gobnet’s Church with its cemetery.
Islanders often had relatives living in Dunquin. We all shared a life that revolved around fishing and farming. People in Dunquin went out of their way to be helpful to the islanders whenever they could. And, of course, Dunquin later became the home of Kruger’s pub, the westernmost pub in all of Europe.
The famous Maurice ‘Kruger’ Kavanagh was born and lived in Dunquin. He was quite an adventurer. He went to America where he spent time in the United States Army and in Hollywood as an agent for actors and boxers. He maintained that he dated the great Mae West. He said that he was a bodyguard for Éamon de Valera, when he was Taoiseach, on his official trip to America. He said that he worked as an orderly at Holyoke Hospital near Springfield, Massachusetts.
Of course, we never knew for sure whether any of it was true. It really didn’t matter, because it was great storytelling. Kruger had a black leather satchel. One day, he went to a cobbler in Dublin and had his name inscribed on the bag as ‘Maurice Kavanagh, MD’. Then he went into Leinster House, right past the security guard and into Dáil Éireann (the Irish parliament, for my American friends). Nobody stopped him because they thought he was a doctor. Kruger had a lot of nerve!
Spiral pier in Dunquin with The Great Blasket in the distance.
Kruger Kavanagh stands beside the van in which he transported Peig Sayers’ body from Dingle Hospital to St Gobnet’s Church for her funeral.
Sometime after I left the island, Kruger started a bar and a guesthouse in Dunquin, named ‘Kruger’s’, of course. He operated without a licence for a while but got caught by the government and then went legit. Brendan Behan, the famous Irish author and one of my friends when I lived in Dublin, stayed there one time. And, naturally, Kruger himself was always there telling stories.
There was a man named Tomás ‘Boiler’ Ó Luíng from Dunquin. Kruger met Boiler’s wife one day and she told him that he was having problems with his bowels. Kruger got a five-gallon bucket of salt water and a bicycle pump. He went to Boiler’s house and pumped all that stuff right into him. Boiler didn’t stop going for a week! A couple of days later, Kruger asked Boiler’s wife how the poor man was doing. His wife said he was as clean as a tin whistle.
I knew Kruger a little bit was when I was young and living on the island. I got to know him better when I was living in Dublin. Kruger and his great friend Joe Daly, from the Irish Folklore Commission, used to come in to see me in Davy Byrnes pub where I was working.
Dingle and its natural harbour on a calm day.
Kruger was quite a man and he had quite a life. He always had big ideas. But he was also a very kind man. He was very helpful to my father when my mother passed away. The islanders loved to tell and retell stories about Kruger’s adventures. He was admired as a kind of a local folk hero.
The academy-award winning film Ryan’s Daughter was shot in Dunquin in the 1960s. They built a whole film set overlooking the island. It was great for the local people. They got paid for lodging, food, and drink and even for acting in bit parts. Kruger’s was packed every night.
Micheál de Mórdha, Director of the Blasket Centre, likes to tell a story about Robert Mitchum, one of the film’s stars, driving along a road when his progress was blocked by a local farmer herding his cattle. Mitchum was mad and yelled, ‘Don’t you know who I am? I’m Robert Mitchum.’
The farmer yelled back, ‘I don’t care if you’re Robert Emmett. These cows can’t go any faster!’ When Mitchum got back to his lodging he got a lesson in Irish history, including the life and times of Ireland’s famous Robert Emmett.
Dingle
Dingle is the closest good-sized town to the island, about 12 miles from Dunquin. It was primarily a fishing village in them days. Islanders would buy all the things in Dingle that they couldn’t get or make on the island. They would take a naomhóg across the bay and then walk the whole 12 miles to town or ask a relative or a friend from Dunquin to give them a ride by horse and cart.
Dick Mack’s shoe shop and pub in Dingle was one of many establishments with multiple commercial uses. It is sometimes called ‘the last pew’ because it is directly across the street from the church.
Going shopping in Dingle was an all-day event or longer. You had to get enough supplies for a whole month or more. You would get tea, sugar, flour, and pre-cured pork and bacon, pig’s head and pig’s knuckle. People also bought coats, shoes and trousers. You would get whole bags of stuff.
There were no pubs on the island, of course, but there were plenty of pubs in Dingle. In fact, there were 52 pubs and only about 700 people. I believe that Dingle had the most public houses in Ireland for the size of the town. In them days, you could get groceries, or maybe hardware or shoes in one end of a pub. And then in the other end of the establishment, there was the bar. It was intermixed – a shop and a bar, like Dick Mack’s on Greene Street that is both a bar and a shoe shop, or Foxy John’s on Main Street that is a bar, a hardware store and a bicycle shop all together.
My father’s cousin, Martin Keane, used to have a public house on Main Street named Keane’s. The islanders used to buy food and things there. The more they bought at Keane’s, the more drink he gave them. But since they weren’t used to it, they couldn’t handle it. It was not a pretty sight.
Emigration
The huge Irish emigration to America began in the middle of the 1800s. They say that more than 4 million Irish people emigrated to America over the years. Most of them came from rural areas in Ireland where conditions were very bad, particularly during and just after the Famine.
My grandfather’s generation included the first islanders to emigrate to America. His sister Nellie Carney (Neilí Ní Cheárna), my great aunt, was the first Carney to make the big move across the Atlantic to Springfield, Massachusetts, probably in the 1880s. Then, in my father’s generation, there were four Carney brothers who emigrated to America. In his day, the process was easy because you could come to America without any papers. America was ‘open’, as they said. In fact, so many people from West Kerry emigrated that when I was a kid, we had many more relatives in America than we had in Ireland.
Annie Moore from County Cork was the first person admitted to America through the new immigration centre at Ellis Island in New York on 1 January 1892. Over 12 million immigrants passed through the facility. It was phased out and then closed in 1954. This statue, in Cobh, County Cork, honours Annie Moore and her brothers.
The islanders were attracted to America; by the letters, and the money and the beautiful clothes their relatives sent. And they were impressed by the amount of money they made at their jobs. I knew quite a b
it about America from school and from the stories I heard on the island and later in Dublin. When all these great stories came back to the island from people who left for America, the motivation to leave increased. As a result, there was even more emigration in my generation than in my father’s time. People thought, ‘Why can’t we go and do the same thing?’
The main reason for the emigration was that the younger generation of islanders was looking for a better life and more opportunities than the island could provide. They were looking for a better social life too. When the younger islanders went to the mainland, they had a good time. They could meet boyfriends and girlfriends. Frankly, there just weren’t enough young females on the island to entice the young men.
So the young people started to move to the mainland to get jobs and many of them eventually went to America. They seemed to go to America, rather than just to the mainland, because the pay was much better in America. They also had the habit of following one another. The conditions in America were a lot better than in Ireland in them days. A lot of people in Ireland were on the dole and jobs were scarce.
The night before an islander was to emigrate, we held a so-called ‘American Wake’. It was basically a going-away party. Most likely, the person leaving would never be seen again. It was a fine send-off, but it was also a sad occasion for those left behind. Everybody showed up to wish their friend or family member well on the adventure of a lifetime. There was music and drink, but there was also lots of crying – just like at a real wake.
Most of the people who emigrated from the island went to Springfield and some to Hartford, Connecticut. Both are about halfway between Boston and New York City. Apparently, the emigrants wanted to live near each other in a new and different place where they really didn’t know anybody other than their friends and relations. So they wound up living in only a couple of places.
Some islanders went to England, Canada, and Australia too. After the war, those countries needed young men to replace those that didn’t come back. They were short of labour. They were looking for immigrants, and the young islanders were looking for opportunities. The result was that the population on the island steadily diminished over the years. And the people who stayed behind on the island were the older people and the very young. These were the people who were least able to take care of themselves. This trend was not good for the future of the island. The downward spiral was under way.
4. Island Education, Literature and Culture
The island was a great place for learning, storytelling, literature, music and dancing. It was a big part of our way of life. But, most of all, we took great pride in our use of the Irish language.
The Island School
The school on the island was owned and operated by the parish of Ferriter, but funded by the government. Attendance was required. My grandfather, Tom Pats Ó Ceárna, apparently donated a small plot of land to the parish for the construction of the school sometime in the mid-1800s. That explains why the school and our house were right next to each other, pretty much attached. I actually did not know about the donation until recently. Oddly, it was not a part of our family’s folklore. The donation was discovered by Dáithí de Mórdha at the Blasket Centre when he was researching island land titles. But now I’m very proud that my family was involved in promoting education on the island even going back a couple of generations.
In 1937, the student body of the island school included seven Carney siblings. Seán is far left with Martin in front of him. Maurice, Billy, Mike and Paddy are in the back row. Maureen is front right. Cousin Máirín Nic Gearailt, the last island teacher, is on the right.
I used to tell my own children in America that when I was a boy growing up on the island, I had to walk 3 miles to school and 3 miles back home every day – barefoot. I was trying to give them a good example to toughen them up. Well, obviously, I was telling a fib. I got my ears pinned back when my kids went to the island for the first time and saw that the school was almost touching our house. I’ll never hear the end of it.
The school on the island had only one room. They put the beginners on the right-hand side of the room and the older kids on the left. The students sat on long benches. There were two teachers, one on each side of the room, each with a blackboard on the front wall. The noise of two classes being held in one room was a bit distracting, but we were used to it.
There were about thirty children attending school when I was there; boys and girls intermixed. We had school all winter. But in the summer, of course, we had a nice long holiday from school.
Our teachers taught us through Irish. They taught Irish, a little English and algebra. I hated algebra. We also had arithmetic, and sentences, and writing, and reading, and speech making. And we had history and world geography, especially American geography.
On the wall there were two big maps, one of Europe and one of America. We were taught all the big cities and rivers in Europe and America. The teacher would ask you to go up to the map and show the class different places in America. I always thought that was great fun. We were always very interested in America. The teachers spoke about it quite often because all of us had so many relatives there.
My father went to school on the island too. He used to talk about a schoolteacher named Thomas Savage. He was from Tralee, a stocky man. I heard lots of stories from my father about ‘Mr Savage’. He was a strict disciplinarian with a stick and a leather whip. He was, of course, trying to make sure that the students behaved themselves. My father thought he went a bit overboard.
In my time, we had a teacher named Nora Ní Shéaghdha from Moorestown (Paróiste Mórdhach) on the Dingle Peninsula. She was my schoolteacher for most of my years in the island school. She had just graduated from college when she arrived on the island. Later, she wrote a book called Thar Bealach Isteach (‘Across the Sound’) about island life. Miss Shea taught at the school for at least forty years. She taught me on the island in the early 1930s and then, many decades later, she taught my friend and relation, Micheál Ó Cinnéide, when he was growing up in Moorestown in the 1960s.
Miss Shea used the stick quite often. Sometimes we would pinch the girls and tease them to get them to laugh. Or maybe you weren’t paying attention to what she was saying. If she caught you, she would give you a good whack on the knuckles or on the legs.
My first cousin, Máirín Nic Gearailt or ‘Minnie Fitz’ from Marhin (Márthain), Ballyferriter, was an island teacher for a while. She was the one who got us ready for the Preparatory Examination, the national test for getting into college. I always thought that, unfortunately, our teachers did not really want to be teaching on the island. I thought that they would rather be teaching somewhere else. There was very little social life for them; it was too wild a place and there was lots of bad weather.
The island was sometimes said to have a lack of quality education. But in my time, there were four men from the island appointed to the Garda Síochána, the national police: Muiris Ó Súilleabháin, Pádraig Ó Catháin, Micheál Ó Guithín and Tadhg Ó Conchúir. And there were three islanders appointed schoolteachers: Pádraig Ó Duinnshléibhe and Máirín Ní Dhuinnshléibhe, a brother and sister, and Cáitlin Ní Chatháin. This was a pretty good showing for an island our size, about 170 people at the peak of the population. So our teachers were obviously pretty good.
I loved to read when I was a boy. I used to read books about history, especially about ‘the Troubles’. I read stories about Michael Collins, Arthur Griffith and other leaders of the Easter Rising. And, of course, I read about Fionn mac Cumhaill (Finn McCool), the famous warrior. For me, reading was a great adventure. I remember reading Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes in Irish.
We had books on the island, but not a real library. We had a few books that our teacher let us borrow from time to time. Visitors to the island used to bring books with them, and they often left them behind for the islanders to read.
Eventually, as the island population dwindled, the number of children attending the i
sland school went down too. My sister Maureen moved in with our aunt and uncle, Máire and Seán Mac Gearailt, in the mainland village of Marhin. She then went to school in Ballyferriter. The island school was closed in 1941 when there were only two students left. One of them was my youngest brother Billy.
At that point, Billy moved to Black Field on the mainland and lived with our cousin, Siobhán Uí Shé, my uncle Pats Tom’s daughter, so he could go to school in Ballyferriter. Billy had to walk to school each day, a couple of miles each way. And this time I’m telling the truth!
The closing of the school was another reason why life on the island was coming to an end. When a child reached school-going age, the family had to make arrangements for the child to go to school over on the mainland. That created all kinds of hardships for the island families. It often seemed to be easier for the whole family to move off the island.
Folklore
The islanders were noted for telling stories. It was a very important part of daily life on the island. Stories were handed down from earlier generations and new ones were made up. There were stories about things that happened on the island and to relatives on the mainland or in America. We also told stories about bad weather, especially the wind or big storms called ‘gaoth mhór’.
Most of the stories were true, but some were fiction. Some were funny. Many taught a lesson. We used to question the storyteller too. There was lots of audience participation. It was lots of fun, great ‘craic’. There were stories about Saint Patrick driving the snakes out of Ireland, about the poet and revolutionary Piaras Feiritéar and his adventures trying to escape the British Army, about the wreck of a ship from the Spanish Armada off the island and the drowning of a Spanish princess, about the warriors Fionn mac Cumhail and Cú Chulainn (‘The Hound of Culann’).
From the Great Blasket to America Page 6