Sometimes they told ghost stories to entertain and scare the kids. Somebody might see a shadow or an illusion and that would lead to a story about fairies (sí) or banshees (mná sí). Islanders were very superstitious.
Many nights, we used to go visit the ‘Dáil’ for stories and a bite to eat. This was a house at the top of the village owned by Máire ‘na Dálach’ Uí Chearna – no relation. Mary always liked company and her house was the main meeting place for people on the island. It was nicknamed the ‘Dáil’, because everybody went up there to talk all the time.
We also did a lot of storytelling in winter at different people’s houses. Guests brought turf for the fire or a bit of food to be shared with the others. In the summer, the stories would be told outdoors, often down by the pier, overlooking the Sound.
A great storyteller was called a ‘seanchaí’ . But everybody got into the act. We went around the group and everybody who had a story spoke up when it came their turn. Naturally, you tried to tell a better story than the others. Storytelling was a pastime, something like watching television in America.
My father was a great storyteller. He told stories about America and Springfield, and the people he met from other countries and his job on the railroad. In fact, it appeared that anybody who went anywhere from the island and returned then became a storyteller. People were curious about life beyond the island. I suppose that all the great stories of life in America contributed to the desire to emigrate.
The Visitors
A lot of visitors came to the island to study Irish, mostly in the summer. The island was one of the few places where people spoke only Irish and its form of Irish was pure. If you were an Irish scholar, the island was the place to go. It was a kind of an educational holiday in a very beautiful place.
It was always a big deal when the visitors arrived. We could see them coming across the Sound in a naomhóg and we always gave them a big welcome. When the visitors landed, we would greet them saying ‘Fáilte, a dhuine uasal’. This was a traditional greeting in them days. The visitors would usually respond with ‘Lá breá’ (‘fine day’). These were often the only Irish words that they knew. So the islanders started to call the visitors the ‘Lá breás’.
There was no hotel on the island, so the visitors would stay with island families that had extra room. The visitors would pay for their room and board. It was a ‘bed and breakfast’ type of situation.
The visitors loved to go hiking and swimming. And they loved the storytelling. They usually carried notebooks and they were constantly writing things down.
On nice days, we would take the visitors back up to the top of the hill to the Fort and the Crow and show them the whole island. They would give us a shilling or two for our trouble.
When I was a boy, one of the visitors to the island gave me a shilling for giving him a tour of the island. I hid the shilling under a stone up in the gable in our old house to keep it from my brothers. Then I forgot it. I suppose it’s still there!
People on the island used to talk about the visit of John Millington Synge after the turn of the twentieth century. Synge wrote the play The Playboy of the Western World, which was based on people he met on the island. Carl Marstrander from Norway was another visitor. He once qualified to be an Olympic pole-vaulter. People said that one time he jumped right over a house on the island using the oar from a naomhóg for a pole. His nickname was ‘An Lochlannach’ (‘The Viking’). Synge and Marstrander were before my time. In my day, the most important visitors included George Thomson, George Chambers and Kenneth Jackson, all from England.
But the visitor who made the biggest impression on me was Robin Flower. He was a student of Marstrander and a keeper or curator at the British Museum in London. He came back to the island year after year.
Flower’s nickname was ‘Little Flower’ or ‘Bláithín’. When he got married, he spent his honeymoon on the island. He often brought his wife and his family with him. One time he took a leave of absence from his job and spent a whole year on the island with his family. His children even went to school there.
Flower used to sit down with the people and smoke a cigarette. He was interested in learning as much as he could about island life. We would talk in Irish and English intermixed. The islanders felt that Flower had earned the right to be called an islander. He even had his ashes scattered on the island when he died.
We would have long conversations with other visitors in Irish and this would improve their knowledge of the language. And we would listen to the visitors and pick up some English. The learning was a two-way street.
The visitors spent their time primarily with the older people. My teacher told us kids to leave them alone. So we maintained a bit of distance.
Probably the biggest legacy of the visitors was in encouraging some of the islanders to write down their stories and helping them to do so. This was the basis for all the great literature that came from the island.
Island Authors
I think that the sea has some kind of quality to it that makes you able to see things more clearly. There are fewer distractions. Someone once said, ‘if you want to become a good writer, go live on an island’. Maybe that’s why the island was home to such a large number of famous storytellers and authors for the small size of the population.
I knew all three of the most famous authors from the island, Tomás Ó Criomhthain (Thomas O’Crohan), Muiris Ó Súilleabháin (Maurice O’Sullivan) and Peig Sayers. They were all great storytellers. That’s how they became great writers. Their books were translated into many languages and have been read around the whole world. I read all the most famous books about the island when I was living in Dublin, including Ó Criomhthain’s The Islandman (An tOileánach) and Island Cross-Talk (Allagar na hInse), Ó Súilleabháin’s Twenty Years a-Growing (Fiche Bliain ag Fás); and Sayers’ Peig and An Old Woman’s Reflections (Machnamh Seanmhná). These books were all published in the 1920s and 1930s.
There are now more than fifty books about the island. It seems that the whole story of the island captures the imagination of people everywhere. Through these books, people in Ireland and in America became aware of the island as a very special place.
Tomás Ó Criomhthain
The famous Tomás Ó Criomhthain was born in 1856 and died at seventy-one in early 1937, just before I left the island. I attended his wake. It was a fairly quiet affair with all the usual lamenting.
Ó Criomhthain learned to read and write in Irish in the school on the island. He had some English too. He taught both Marstrander and Flower how to speak Irish during their visits to the island. And, in turn, they encouraged him to write down his life story and his observations on life on the island. These writings became the widely read books The Islandman and Island Cross-Talk.
Ó Criomhthain had plenty of tragedy in his life. His son Tomás drowned one day in heavy surf down on the strand trying to save his sister Cáit and Eibhlín Nic Niocaill, a visitor and the girlfriend of the famous patriot Patrick Pearse. Young Tomás and Eibhlín both drowned.
A statue of Tomás Ó Criomhthain stands outside the Blasket Centre.
Actually, my uncle Pats Tom dived right into the water with his clothes and hobnailed boots on and he somehow managed to keep Cáit afloat until a couple of lads in a naomhóg were able to pull her out of the water. Only his bravery prevented an even worse tragedy. Pats Tom was awarded a bronze medal by the King of England for his efforts and he always wore it proudly for special occasions.
Anyway, they said Ó Criomhthain was never the same after that very sad event. He was a little lost.
Brian Kelly, a visitor from Killarney, helped Ó Criomhthain to edit his books and a visitor named Patrick Sugrue, nicknamed ‘An Seabhac’ (The Hawk), helped to get them published. I knew An Seabhac very well. We both lived on Morehampton Road in Dublin for a while. I would drop in to see him from time to time to talk about the island.
(L–r) Robin Flower and Tomás Ó Criomhthain.
Ó C
riomhthain was very old when I was living on the island. I remember visiting his house during the Wren and getting a pinch of sugar from him. For the most part, he was quiet and kept to himself. I think it was just his old age and the hard life he lived.
Ó Criomhthain could see that life on the island was drawing to an end. In the last chapter of The Islandman he wrote: ‘I have written minutely of much that we did, for it was my wish that somewhere there should be a memorial of it all, and I have done my best 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 again.’ These were prophetic words indeed.
Muiris Ó Súilleabháin
Muiris Ó Súilleabháin was about fifteen years older than me and I knew him pretty well. He was born on the island, but his mother died when he was one or two years old. He spent a number of years living in an orphanage in Dingle and moved back to the island when he was maybe eight or nine. He actually had to learn Irish when he came back to the island because he spoke only English on the mainland.
One of the visitors, George Thomson, a professor from King’s College in Cambridge, England, became a close friend and mentor for Ó Súilleabháin. Thomson had a serious romance with my cousin Mary Kearney (Máire Ní Chearna). There was even talk of marriage, but Thomson was a Protestant, not a Catholic. Their relationship broke off and Mary later emigrated to America where she became a nun, Sister Mary Clemens, SP. She did a lot of good work for children from broken homes.
After he completed school on the island, Ó Súilleabháin thought about going to America but instead he went into the Garda Síochána. He got his Garda training in Phoenix Park in Dublin. When he came home to the island in his garda uniform and cap, we thought he looked like a general in the army. He had a great physique. I started to think that I might want to be a garda myself. For a time, we all wanted to be in the gardaí, just like him.
Ó Súilleabháin was a great talker. His books were about things that happened on the island while I was growing up: stuff like chasing rabbits, catching birds, and playing in the water on the strand and the devilment we used to do.
Thomson encouraged Ó Súilleabháin to use The Islandman as a model and to write about his life up to the point when he joined the gardaí. Ó Súilleabháin was well educated on the island and could read and write in Irish. His book, Twenty Years a-Growing, was written with help from Thomson who also helped translate it into English. I really enjoyed Twenty Years a-Growing because it was about life on the island at about the same time I was living there. I could easily relate to it.
(L–r) Seán Ó Criomhthain, Eiblin Ní Shúilleabháin, unidentified girl, Peig Sayers’ son Micheál Ó Guithín, Muiris Ó Súilleabháin (with the accordion) and Mike Carney.
Thomson and Ó Súilleabháin were close friends for years. Ó Súilleabháin was stationed up in Connemara and later in Galway. He left the Garda Síochána to write full-time, but it didn’t work out and he rejoined the police.
Unfortunately, Ó Súilleabháin drowned in Galway Bay just off Salthill in 1950. The word was that he had a heart attack when he was swimming. He was only about forty-five years old. It was yet another tragedy. I read about it in The Kerryman when I was living in Springfield. I was shocked, to say the least!
Peig Sayers
Peig Sayers was born in Baile Bhiocáire, Dunquin, and went into the island when she married an islander, Pádraig Ó Guithín. But, like many other island women, Peig kept her maiden name.
(L–r) George Thomson from England with Muiris Ó Súilleabháin, shown here in his garda uniform.
Peig was a very, very slow speaker. She was a very articulate woman. She became a great storyteller and she had a wonderful memory – instant memory. She was like a radio within herself. She made a big impression on the visitors.
Peig used to talk about growing old. She said she had one foot in the grave and the other on its edge. This is the very first sentence of her famous autobiography, Peig. I don’t know how these things came to her. She had a gift for words.
Peig became famous all over Ireland because, for years, her autobiography, Peig, was required reading for schoolchildren throughout Ireland. Since Peig couldn’t read or write, her son Micheál Ó Guithín helped her with her literature. She essentially dictated her stories to him and he would write them down. Micheál was a poet himself and spent time in America. A visitor named Máire Ní Chinnéide, who I knew in Dublin, edited her work and An Seabhac helped to get her books published.
The gifted storyteller Peig Sayers.
Peig was a very religious woman. She used to say the rosary at her house on Sundays when we could not get to Mass in Dunquin. We all had to go to say the rosary whether we wanted to or not. The praying went on forever. Oh, my poor knees from the cement floor!
My mother was very friendly with Peig. I suppose it was because they both married into the island from the mainland. They would get together and talk from time to time.
Peig moved off the island in the early 1940s when her health declined. She moved back to her former village of Baile Bhiocáire. She gradually went blind. Her son Micheál and lots of old friends used to visit her in the hospital and read to her. She died in Dingle Hospital in 1958. Because of her fame, her funeral was a big event in West Kerry and was attended by lots of dignitaries.
But, like Ó Criomhthain and Ó Súilleabháin, Peig lives on through her books about the island.
Music and Dance
The islanders loved music. They made their own music by singing or playing the tin whistle, the violin, the melodeon – a small accordion or squeeze box – the mouth organ or harmonica, and the Jew’s harp, a metal instrument played by plucking a metal prong held in the mouth.
My father wanted me to play the violin, but I had no time for that kind of thing. I was not interested in music.
The islanders would actually make violins from the ‘wreck’ wood they collected on the beach; they were very handy people. The Dalys and my brother Maurice used to make violins in the winter when they had the time. They would carve the violin out of the wood and buy a string and a bow in Dingle. These violins may not have been the best quality, but they played beautiful music.
Music was played on our instruments in the evening when the day’s work was done or in the winter when days were short. In later years, music would be played on the gramophone, the Victrola. You would wind it up and it would play music. We thought it was a miracle.
The songs on the island were often lamenting songs. They’d be singing something like ‘people have gone away; we’ll never hear from them any more; we’ll never see them again; that’s the final word.’ It was like crying the blues.
‘The Coolin’ (‘An Chúilfhionn’) was kind of our national anthem on the island. The story goes that a woman way back thought she heard another woman lamenting. So they made song of it. It is a sad song or ‘keen’ played on the violin with harmonicas and the accordion too. It would be played at wakes or when the islanders were remembering someone who had gone away, maybe to America. It was very touching. Another favourite was ‘The Faeries’ Lament’ (‘Port na bPúcaí’), yet another song about loss. It was played primarily at wakes.
Visitors and islanders dance in the island schoolyard in 1947.
The laments came down from earlier generations. They included ‘Dark Rosaleen’ and ‘Jimmy Mo Mhíle Stór’. They were all connected with something that happened in the past in Ireland or on the island. They had a historical basis.
We would also do set dances: reels and jigs and hornpipes. People from places like Dunquin, Coumeenole, Moorestown, Ventry and Ballyferriter would come into the island for the weekend to dance. We would dance in the ‘Dáil’ or in the new houses or down on the strand where there was a level strip of land. We would kick up quite a bit of dust with the furious movement of our feet; often there was actually a cloud of dust. We would spread sand on the floor to keep it down. We always said that our visitors would go home with the
soles of their shoes all worn off from dancing on the cement floors in the new houses.
And, of course, there was also an opportunity for a little romance among the young people. Sometimes boys and girls would wander away up the hill along the paths for a little bit of romantic time together. All this was great ‘craic’. I have fond memories of those times.
5. The Carneys: An Island Family
There were many reasons why islanders decided to move to the mainland or America. They were pretty satisfied with island life, but the truth was that it involved lots of hardship. They heard good things about opportunities in America and they wanted a better life. I maintain that a lot of people on the island were sick and tired of fighting the weather and the ocean all the time, and of a life based on the dwindling fishing business. They wanted to get away from it all.
As time went on and conditions on the island got worse, the pull of the mainland and America got stronger. And then people wanted to avoid being left behind in a bad situation without a mate as others moved away.
My father, Seán Tom Ó Ceárna, grew up on the island and went to school there. He spoke Irish and enough English to get by. He wasn’t a big reader or writer. He felt the strong pull of America and emigrated not once, but twice. He stayed for about five or six years each time and then went back to the island for good.
People leaving for America usually took a passenger ship from the port of Cobh in Cork, about a hundred miles east of the island. Tickets were purchased at Galvin’s Travel Agency located on John Street in Dingle. The boat fee was only £5. In them days, it was very easy to go to America. No visa or passport was required. There were no security clearances; just up and go. The crowded ships landed in Boston or New York. People had to pass a health inspection and then travel to their final destination from there, usually by train.
From the Great Blasket to America Page 7