At one time, Mulcahy was a general in the Irish army and Minister for Defence, and he would go on to be Minister for Education. I met him once or twice. I could have asked my friend, Éamon Kissane TD, to get involved but Mulcahy had more seniority and had been a cabinet minister so he would have had more political influence. Mulcahy was a great friend of the island, having pressed the government during 1946 about radio communication with the island and about the horrible condition of Dunquin pier.
I had met Mulcahy’s daughter several times. She was a dedicated Irish dancer and she used to go back to Dunquin and into the island to dance. She worked in the Government Buildings in Dublin and gave me her father’s phone number. I called him shortly after my return to Dublin from my brother’s funeral and told him about Seán’s death and the hardship and the difficulties of the island. He invited me to his home at Castle Grove to give him the details. I cycled over to his house and spent about an hour with him and detailed the circumstances on the island. He said that he would see what he could do, but he was not specific about his plans. He was very sympathetic.
Then, on 25 February 1947, Mulcahy brought up my brother Seán’s death on the floor of the Dáil during question time. He asked the government why the wireless was always out of order and about the lack of adequate pier facilities. Mulcahy asked the Minister of Industry and Commerce ‘if he will cause a tribunal of inquiry to be set up to inquire into, and to report on, the contributory circumstances under which Seán Ó Ceárna, who recently became ill on Oileán mBlascaod, died there after a week’s illness, without it being possible to summon or to bring to his aid spiritual or medical assistance’.
The minister responded for the government. He dismissed the problem as the result of a temporary power outage and bad weather. Mulcahy brought the matter up again on 12 March. The Minister for Posts and Telegraphs was forced to provide detailed information on the radio outages. The Minister reported that over the previous fifteen months, radio service was out for eighty-six days, with partial outages on another thirty-eight days. The Minister promised further inquiry. But nothing ever came of it.
A couple of months after Seán died and a month after Mulcahy’s questions in the Dáil, the islanders sent de Valera a telegram saying, ‘Stormbound distress. Send food. Nothing to eat.’ It was signed ‘Blaskets’. As a result, the government sent a boat with emergency food in April. The legend has it that there was some strong drink in the boat, too.
The islanders wanted to keep up the pressure. They realised that the old people couldn’t manage and the young people had left. They were stuck. They were up against the wall. Apparently, famous Kruger from Dunquin was involved in some way in sending the distress telegram to de Valera. Kruger was a good leader because he was a good talker. He was always stirring the pot. And he wanted to help the islanders.
Evidently, all this eventually made an impression on de Valera and he decided to visit the island in July 1947 to see for himself. My brother Martin and Pats ‘Ceaist’ Ó Catháin transported de Valera from his boat to the island pier by naomhóg and were paid £3 for their effort. A group of islanders met the Taoiseach at the top of the pier. There were about eight or ten of them, including Muiris Ó Catháin, my father and my uncle Pats Tom.
The distress telegram sent by the islanders to de Valera.
The Taoiseach toured the village and talked with the people in Irish and asked questions about their life on the island. He wanted to understand from them directly what the conditions were and whether they wanted to be moved off the island. There had been no King on the island since the passing of ‘Mickey’ Ó Catháin. The oldest person on the island, Muiris Ó Catháin, was the spokesman for the islanders. He told de Valera that they were suffering great hardship and that they wanted to move to the mainland. They talked about the price of fish and the fact that they had no salt to preserve the fish for the winter.
My father told me that he said to de Valera: ‘Get us some place, sir, where we can walk.’ What he meant was, get us away from the island and the ocean and move us over to the mainland.
De Valera left the island without making any commitments, but the islanders felt that they had convinced him to do something about the situation. I kept my family up to date on my work in Dublin in support of the evacuation in letters to Cáit. They appreciated my effort, but were impatient for results. To them, the hardship seemed to go on forever.
Éamon de Valera (right) visits The Great Blasket Island. Mike Carney’s father, Seán Tom, is in the middle of the photo scratching his head. Maíre Uí Ghuithín is to the left.
News for Mary
The Second World War ended in 1945, and America opened up for immigration in 1947. There was an announcement about it in the newspapers and a lot of talk about it around Dublin.
I got my affidavit and applied to go to America in 1947, but I was delayed by my brother’s death. Then, when that tragic situation was resolved and I thought that the remaining islanders would be moved to the mainland in the near future, I decided that it was time to move. It was 1948, and it was the beginning of my family’s third wave of emigration to America. This time, I was going to lead the way.
Mary Philomena Ward.
I had been dating Mary Ward for about two years. We spent a lot of time together. One night when I walked her home after going to a dance, I said, ‘I think I’m going to emigrate to America.’ I told her that I was intending to create whole new opportunities for my family.
I liked Dublin a lot. And Mary too. We took advantage of everything that Dublin had to offer. But I was committed to doing something about my family’s dire circumstances back on the island. Mary didn’t get angry with me. She was easy to get along with, which, I suppose, is why I liked her so much. At the time, based on her reaction, I did not think she would ever emigrate to America and so I had a heavy heart. But I was hoping that she would change her mind at some point.
Six Years of Frustration
After de Valera’s visit in the summer of 1947, the islanders had high hopes for a quick resolution of their situation. But they were soon disappointed. The relocation to the mainland did not happen as quickly as they hoped. Governments just don’t move very fast. A couple of months after de Valera’s visit, the islanders sent the Taoiseach a letter, asking for information on his plan to deal with the situation. In the handwritten note, the islanders said ‘if you can’t help us, we will have to go across the Atlantic to seek our fortune.’ They were trying to raise the stakes. Again, there was no reply.
The last person born on the island was Gearóid Ó Cathaín. Born in 1947, Gearóid was called ‘the loneliest boy in the world’ by The Irish Press in 1951. There were no other children because they had all left the island with their families. They said that seagulls were his playmates. It was so sad.
Unfortunately, de Valera was defeated in the elections in early 1948. The future of the island was still up in the air and de Valera’s defeat was a blow. The new Taoiseach, Fine Gael’s John Costello, did not have much interest in the issue. Over the next couple of years, there were reports and commissions and inspections related to the future of the island. And I’m sure that there were lots of meetings in Dublin too. But there was no concrete action. In the meantime, the island population continued to decline. The situation was getting desperate as the politicians talked.
Frustration on the island went up. Conditions got worse. It was a vicious circle.
The islanders tried to keep up the pressure. Still another communication was sent to the government in September 1952. There were twenty-eight people still remaining on the island. In a ‘memorial,’ the islanders pleaded: ‘We are prepared for any migration, anything to leave the island, but we will be satisfied with a house and one acre, or even a house, on the mainland.’ It was signed by Muiris Ó Guithín, Seán Ó Guithín, Muiris Ó Catháin and Seán Ó Catháin.
With de Valera back in office as Taoiseach, the government decided in late 1952 to evacuate the island; all the rema
ining islanders were to be moved to the mainland. It was good news at long last and there was some relief in the minds of the islanders.
But the final evacuation of the island was still another year away.
Cáit’s New Home on the Mainland
In 1944, my sister Cáit got married to Pádraig ‘Sheáisi’ or ‘Paddy’ Ó Cearna, an islander with the same last name, but who was no relation. He was from the other Carney clan on the island. Paddy lived close to our home, just on the other side of the school. He had worked in England for four years before marrying Cáit. After they got married, Cáit and her husband lived in our family’s house on the island with my father.
Then Cáit had a baby boy named Seán. At that point, Cáit and Paddy bought a small house in Muiríoch near Ballydavid. Cáit then moved off the island with her family on Easter Sunday in 1948. In the end, my sister Cáit was fed up with the island. She was glad to leave and wasn’t lamenting her departure at all. Her patience was exhausted. She was sick of fighting the wind and the ocean and the circumstances.
My Father’s Move to the Mainland
Families were very close back then and took care of their own. People were dedicated to their families; it was a commitment within them. My last two brothers to leave the island were Martin and Tom. Martin had spent time in England, but came home for a time to help out. He then emigrated to America at the age of twenty-one. A short while later, Tom, who had stayed on the island to help my father tend his sheep, also emigrated to America.
At about that time, Cáit then asked my father to move to her house in Muiríoch. My father really had no choice since he was in his late sixties and was too old to function alone on the island. He reluctantly agreed and moved in with Cáit. It was crowded in Cáit’s small house since she eventually had five children of her own. So my father built a one-room addition for himself. He had sold his flock of sheep and invested some of the money in the new addition.
In the end, my father wasn’t sorry to leave the island either. He was glad to put his feet on the ground, as he said to de Valera. He just packed up everything, left the family home and moved to the mainland. He was the last member of our family to leave the island. The evacuation was still months away. For sentimental reasons, he would visit the island for a month or so during the summer with Cáit’s husband and their son Seán.
One day, Cáit’s husband Paddy and my father took the roof off the addition on our vacant house on the island and actually moved it to Cáit’s house in Muiríoch. They installed that roof on the new addition my father had built for himself. They took it all the way across the ocean to Ballydavid balanced between two naomhóga, a distance of about 5 or 6 miles. It was a big adventure! Some people thought they were just trying to save money on a new roof. But they also did it for tradition, for sentimental reasons. It was a common thing to take a memento from the old house on the island to the mainland. The Ó Criomhthain family did the same thing.
The first thing that deteriorated on the unoccupied stone houses on the island was the roofs. Then, with the homes open to the weather, the deterioration sped up. The result was that the old houses went to ruins over a period of years. Some of the old paths became overgrown with weeds.
My father liked living in Muiríoch. It was a nice seaside village. He still couldn’t get away from the ocean. He loved to look out at it. Muiríoch was a fishing village and they had a harbour in nearby Ballydavid with a beach and lobster pots. On a clear day, he could look out from Cáit’s house and see the island of Inishtooskert, one of the lesser Blaskets, in the distance. He used to go down to the pier and watch the fishing boats come in. And he would go to Begley’s pub or maybe O’Connor’s and have his couple of pints and go home. He wasn’t much of a pub man. Tomás Ó Criomhthain’s son, Seán, a friend of my father’s, had moved to Muiríoch too and they spent time together.
Cáit wrote to me in Springfield and told me that my father had moved off the island. Yet again, Cáit had stood up for our family in its hour of need. She was a saint.
For me, his move was bittersweet. I was pleased that, finally, my poor father would be well taken care of in the twilight of his life. No longer did he have to walk up and down the hill on the island and then complain about it to anyone who would listen. On the other hand, our family’s long life on the island was over. But I felt that, while there were no more Carneys living on the island, our connection with the island would go on forever.
After our family left the island, there were only twenty or so people still left, the hard core. They could see that the end was near, but they hung on until the bitter end.
The Evacuation
The government’s plan for evacuating the island was to entice some of the small property owners in Dunquin to move down in the country, to the good farming land in Meath and Kildare. Some jumped at it, because it was easier living and more valuable land. After they went, the islanders would move into their former homes in Dunquin or into a few new homes built there by the government. Then the islanders could do their farming and fishing on the mainland. A lot of them were on the old-age pension.
The government evacuated the last of the islanders, beginning on 17 November 1953. Emigration from the island had increased quite a bit since my brother Seán’s death six years earlier. The twenty-two islanders left at the end were, as far as I remember:
Eilís and Seán Ó Cearna – wife and husband – Seán was my first cousin
Muiris and Seán Ó Guithín – brothers
Micheál, Pádraig and Seán Ó Súilleabháin – brothers
Pádraig and Tomás Ó Dálaigh – brothers
Bríd and Seán Ó Catháin – wife and husband – with their son Gearóid Ó Catháin
Neilí and Pats Tom Ó Cearna – wife and husband – Pats Tom was my uncle
Pádraig ‘Fíogach’ Mistéal – called ‘Dogfish’
Micheál Ó Sé and Máire Ní Shé – brother and sister
Seán ‘Faeilí’ Ó Catháin
Seán ‘Sheáisi’ Ó Cearna – the brother of my sister Cáit’s husband Paddy
Seán ‘Filí’ Ó Cearna – a cousin and one of those who went to get the coffin for my brother Seán
Máire and Seámus Ó Duinnshléibhe – wife and husband
Many of them were up in their sixties – or older. Seven of them were named Seán, a very popular name on the island. There were only three couples, one child and one older single woman. Eleven of them were bachelors in their thirties or forties. They were still single because there were no eligible women on the island and women from the mainland didn’t want to marry into the island.
None of my immediate family was left on the island by the time of the evacuation. My brothers and sisters were all off to America. My father and Cáit were in Muiríoch.
On the day of the evacuation, the government sent a fishing boat from Dingle, the Saint Laurence O’Toole to pick up the remaining residents of the island and their belongings. The boat was owned by Mike Brosnan from Dingle. It was a typical November day on Blasket Sound with rough seas. This was a challenge because the islanders needed to be transferred from the island to the Saint Laurence O’Toole by naomhóg which had to make three round trips from the island pier.
Due to the bad weather, only six islanders were moved to the mainland that particular day: Seán ‘Sheáisi’ Ó Cearna, Seán ‘Faeilí’ Ó Catháin, Seán Ó Guithín, Seán Ó Súilleabháin, Seán ‘Filí’ Ó Cearna, and Pádraig ‘Fíogach’ Mistéal.
The islanders were glad to be leaving. They just loaded a very few possessions on the Saint Laurence because of the rough seas and got going to the mainland. The remaining seventeen islanders and the furniture had to wait to be moved to the mainland until the weather improved over the next couple of days. Postal service was discontinued.
There was no ceremony or speechmaking. Not even a drink. They were just glad to get out of there. It took several trips on the Saint Laurence over the next couple of days to get the others off the island.
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One family, the Sullivans, stayed on the island for about a year after the evacuation. They just refused to leave – for sentimental reasons. But even they eventually moved to Dunquin. At the point of the evacuation there were several times more people from the island and their descendants living in America than there were living on the island itself. The island was pretty much abandoned after that, except for a few people who would go into the island in the summer. Some of the families maintained their homes in good shape for a while and others continued to raise sheep out there. But the village was soon to go to ruin as a result of the harsh weather and lack of maintenance.
The first six islanders to be evacuated are all smiles on their arrival in Dingle. (L–r) Seán ‘Sheási’ Ó Cearna, Pádraig ‘Fíogach’ Mistéal, Seán Ó Súilleabháin, Seán ‘Filí’ Ó Cearna, Seán Ó Guithín and Seán ‘Faeilí’ Ó Catháin. Legend has it that Ó Guithín is carrying an RMS Lusitania deckchair that washed up on the island sometime after the ship’s sinking off Kinsale by Germany in 1915 with the loss of 1,195 lives.
By the time of the evacuation, I had been living in America for five years. I read an account of the event in The Kerryman about a week after it had occurred. I spread the word among the former islanders living on Hungry Hill in Springfield. The reaction was mixed for obvious reasons.
My own feeling was that it was about time. The evacuation did not involve any members of my family, but I was still upset that it took the government so long to act when the only practical course of action was so obvious. I was pleased that my own efforts in support of the evacuation had, at long last, come to fruition but was disappointed not to see it in person. The evacuation was the right thing to do but it had been delayed for too long. Today, there is not much left of the village, just the stone walls from the old houses. And the five ‘new’ houses that are still in pretty good shape. It’s a ghost town, really. And the ghosts are the souls of my forebears. After all these years, the thought of it still nearly makes me cry.
From the Great Blasket to America Page 12