14

Tomás O Criomhthain, An tOileánach (1929)

The Blasket Islands are a small archipelago off the coast of the Dingle peninsula in north-west Kerry, itself a rugged county in the south-west of Ireland. The largest island, the Great Blasket, is about three miles from the mainland and about five miles long. The area is one of great natural beauty. The entire Dingle area was, until very recently, completely Irish-speaking, and the inhabitants of the Blaskets were themselves nearly all monoglot Irish speakers until the evacuation of the islands in 1953. Tomás O Criomhthain (‘O Crohan’) was born in 1856, in the wake of the Great Famine, which had killed a million people and driven another million out of the island of Ireland. The inhabitants of the Blaskets, perhaps two hundred strong at that time, survived the famine mainly by the fact that they subsisted in large part on fishing and hunting rather than on that monocrop that had doomed Ireland, the potato. Seal hunting, rabbit hunting and fishing preserved other communities along the west coast of Ireland during the terrible years of the 1840s, and commonly preserved also the Irish or Gaelic language as the common speech of the people. The Blaskets survived into the modern era as a strange museum of ordinary people who had memories of an almost mediaeval existence; some commentators have used the term ‘Neolithic’ with some exaggeration. The islands used barter among themselves but were perfectly capable of trading with mainland merchants and foreign fishing boats, exchanging catch for cash or manufactured goods.

However, it is clear that the magical world of Geoffrey Keating would not have been completely alien to them. America was the New Island, and seems sometimes to have been seen as a kind of earthly paradise where their loved ones spoke English, were happy people, lived marvellous lives, wore beautiful clothes and experienced a transfigured existence. Life was hard in the Blaskets, and even the supply of turf fuel on the island was disappearing. Emigration to the United States weakened the community in the early twentieth century, and a change in the migration patterns of fish in the late 1930s made the future of the island community look bleak. Eventually the Irish government had the remnant population of the Great Blasket evacuated in 1953. The inhabitants were resettled on the mainland among an Irish-speaking community near their old island home.

Tomás O Criomhthain was taught to read and write in the English language in the 1860s, but his grasp of that tongue was relatively weak, and he spoke an eloquent and rich version of Irish all his life. As a young man he attempted to write down a recitation of a poem by an older man, using English phonetics to represent the Irish, rather like modern Manx; the impulse to record was always there.1 At age forty he was taught by Brian O’Kelly of Killarney to read and write properly in Irish which he eventually did excellently. This achievement was to transform his life, turning him into the author of several minor classic works and one major classic book in the Irish language, starting in 1928 with Island Cross-Talk, pages from his diary between 1919 and 1923.2 His major work, published in 1929, was An tOileánach (The Islandman), which is not just a classic of Gaelic literature, but a significant contribution to world literature in itself.3 Padraig O Siochfhrada (‘An Seabhac’) helped with the editing. Tomás never travelled outside Dingle in his life, and those centres of Kerry emigration, Springfield and Holyoke in Massachusetts were as close and as real to him as was Dublin, the putative capital of his country. Ireland began at Dingle, and he lived in a little country of his own mind, comprising the Blaskets and the western end of the Dingle peninsula.

The Islandman was written as a series of letters to O’Kelly, and is a simple autobiography of a highly intelligent and observant man with little formal education and no library to speak of. What he did have was a folkloric memory which reached back in its jumbled way for hundreds of years, mixing actual historical events with mythology: Fionn Mac Cumhail meets Oliver Cromwell, so to speak. The book begins with his childhood, and he remembers clearly being weaned and looking hungrily at his mother’s breast when already a walking talking little boy of four or five. His schooling was rather hit and miss, as was commonplace among Irish country people at the time. Learning the basic skills of kitchen gardening, game hunting, trapping and sea fishing were regarded quite naturally as being of greater urgency than book learning. The islanders were proud of their independence, being descended mainly from tenants of estates on the mainland who had found a freedom there that they had not enjoyed before. Technically they were tenants on a large estate that covered much of western Dingle, but physical resistance to rent collectors and their police escorts was the norm. In particular, the womenfolk organised themselves with piles of stones to rain down on would-be invaders of their island fastness. In modern times the naomhóg, or canvas skinned canoe (‘currach’), was the main means of transportation by sea and for fishing. However, up to the middle of the nineteenth century the islanders had used larger wooden boats with seine nets for fishing, according to Tomás. Apparently the naomhóg had been partly superseded in the early nineteenth century by the larger boats but came back into its own because of landlord action. Unable to collect rents, the landlord confiscated the island fleet and put it up for sale. The boats were never sold and rotted away in a field near Dingle town, an early example of the use of the people’s weapon of boycott. The naomhóg, being of relatively little value, was used by the islanders in part as a way of dodging rent. Generally the islanders paid no rent to anyone. Eventually the Land Acts were to hand the islands over to the inhabitants after the Land War of 1879–1881. Later still the Congested Districts Board reformed land tenure, in a benign attempt to eliminate rundale.

The book is full of youthful escapades and rough humour, but the harsh realities of life on the Great Blasket are never understated. Tomás was to watch several of his own children die, either from the many incurable diseases of the era or from the physical dangers attendant on island life. Death was a commonplace and everyday thing, and commonly seen as a sought-after release from this hard world and a welcome into a better one elsewhere. The post-Famine diet returned to being based on potatoes, with yellow meal standing in for the potatoes during the scarce months of summertime; fish or small game was a necessary and much appreciated supplement. A shipwreck was regarded as a piece of very good fortune, and wood planks from ships were much coveted on the treeless islands. Whiskey and exotic drinks from wrecks were much sought after, as was clothing. Famously, tea was first used on the island as a dye for home-spun clothing. Later the islanders became, like most Irish people, great tea-drinkers. The First World War was a prosperous time from the islanders’ point of view, as the shipwrecking rate went up mainly due to the operations of U-boats in the western Atlantic. The ending of the book is justly famed, written as an old man in 1926 awaiting death or perhaps the pension payable at age seventy. He lived long enough to enjoy the money for a decade. He has no complaints, and concludes calmly:

It was a good life in those days. Shilling came on shilling’s heels; food was plentiful, and things were cheap. Drink was cheap too. It wasn’t thirst for the drink that made us want to go where it was, but only the need to have a merry night after the misery that we knew only too well before. What the drop of drink did to us was to lift up the hearts in us, and we would spend a day and a night ever and again in company together when we got the chance. That’s all gone now, and the high heart and the fun are passing from the world. Then we’d take the homeward way together easy and friendly after all our revelry, like the children of one mother, none doing hurt or harm to his fellow.

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.4

Fiche Blian ag Fás, or Twenty Years A-Growing was written a few years later by Maurice O’Sullivan and was a worthy successor to An tOileánach. A much younger man, born in 1904, Maurice spent his childhood in Dingle, and came to the island around 1910. An English-speaker, he learned his Irish on the Great Blasket, and did so very quickly. O’Sullivan describes a similar world, but seems to have had a stronger bent toward mythology and tall tales in general. Unlike Tomás he was eventually to leave the island and travel through the great world of Ireland to the big city of Dublin. Like Tomás, he was befriended and helped by an outside scholar, George Thompson, a well-known academic writer of the time. Surviving film demonstrates that Thompson learned perfect Kerry Irish with a barely detectable English accent. Their first encounter in 1923 is described vividly and amusingly by Maurice:

He was now only forty yards away, a man neither too tall nor too short, with knee-breeches and a shoulder-cloak, his head bare and a shock of dark brown hair gathered straight back on it. I was growing afraid. There was not his like in the Island. Where had he come from and he approaching me now from the top of the hill in the darkening of the day? I leant my back against the bank of the ditch. I drew out my pipe and lit it. Then I turned my gaze to the south-east, thinking no doubt he would pass me by on his way, so that I could take his measure and say I had seen a leprechaun.5

Maurice recovered from seeing this apparition. The two men talked to each other. Maurice agreed to teach George Irish, and in return George became a kind of career advisor to the islandman. He persuaded Maurice not to emigrate to America with everyone else, but instead to join the new police force the Dublin government was setting up at the time. It also seems that George persuaded him to write the memoir, which was published soon after An tOileánach. It is, of course, Fiche Blian ag Fás (Twenty Years A-Growing). Thompson, with some help from others, translated it into English, and he seems also to have urged the writing of its still-unpublished sequel, Fiche Blian ag Bláth (Twenty Years A-Flowering). O’Sullivan did go on to join the Garda Síochána, and eventually resigned from the force and went into farming on the mainland in Galway. There is an entertaining account of his recruitment into the Garda and Thompson’s role as a minder of sorts in Dublin in Twenty Years A-Growing. He was to have considerable difficulty with the timetabling of the Irish railway system of the time and finding his way around the city.

The mini-renaissance that occurred on the Blaskets between 1880 and 1940 seems to have been derived from a benign encounter between three very different sets of people: the islanders themselves, Protestant missionaries in the 1830s who made them literate, and the romantic linguistic movements in academia in western Europe in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Thompson and Flower together with Kenneth Jackson were among the half-dozen English academic scholars known to have perfected their Irish on the Island in the first decades of the twentieth century. Eibhlís Ní Shúilleabháin wrote letters to George Chambers of London between 1931 and 1951 in a similar exercise to that of Tomás, who was her father-in-law.6 Similarly, Peig Sayers was persuaded by Máire Ní Chinnéide to dictate her reminiscences to her son, and her two principle books, Peig and An Old Woman’s Reflections, were both created in the mid-1930s and translated into English much later. From the beginning of the century onward, Irish scholars inspired by the Gaelic League followed the Englishmen to the island, and there was at least one Norwegian (Carl Marstrander) among these new missioners. Strangely, these missioners came at the last moment, as even the islanders themselves knew by around 1930 that their time was limited. Among other things, the supply of turf (peat) as fuel was running out and would be gone within the lifetimes of the younger inhabitants. Too much can be made of this, however; for years the Aran Islands were supplied with turf from the mainland by hooker (turf boat). J.M. Synge’s early sojourn on the Aran Islands and his visit to the Great Blasket in 1905 seem also to have operated as an inspiration to the visitors.

Fiche Blian ag Fás contains many strange tales. One involves a traveller (‘The Wanderer’) from Dingle who visits the Great Blasket. He has been all over the world and relates a supernatural experience, presumably some form of nightmare or hallucination. He walks with a companion towards Springfield. They encounter a man with a big black dog. Then he finds himself alone suddenly in a graveyard in an unfamiliar landscape. A path leads to a castle with bright lights. He encounters various obstacles, but it becomes clear that the castle is inhabited by people whom he has known long ago in this life and who are now dead. They are banqueting. He wanders farther and finds himself in a laneway only as wide as he is, and bordered by high concrete walls:

I was walking on and on with no sight of the city of Springfield yet nor with any news of it to be had. … I heard a bell ringing behind me. Looking back I saw a bicycle coming towards me like the wind. I could not get out of the way. It was impossible. God save my soul, said I, he will split me. He was nearer now, a big lamp of light on the bicycle and no slackening of speed. I looked up at the wall to see if I could climb it. But at that moment the bicycle passed me like a whirlwind. That was the strangest thing of all.7

Apparently the bicycle is riderless. He believes himself to be dead and in the next world. He finds himself suddenly in familiar surroundings, his companion from the previous night in danger of death from supernatural causes. People seem to think that the Wanderer is himself to blame for this. All of this seems to be echoed in parody by Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, written ten years later and involving supernatural policemen, a nameless man who is dead, who realises gradually that he is guilty of murder and having a brief but vivid love affair with a sentient and very charming bicycle. O’Brien used the Blasket writings in various ways, and this appears to be one of the most complete and unacknowledged, probably because his book was published posthumously. As in The Third Policeman, not only is there a bicycle, but there are plenty of policemen in O’Sullivan’s autobiography. Again, the world view of Tomás is lampooned gently in O’Brien’s Irish-language satire, An Béal Bocht (The Poor Mouth), written in 1941.

Although the Blasket writers did get official recognition, their work was not really a source of the nostalgia expressed by de Valera in his well-known speech on radio on St Patrick’s Day 1943 (‘The Ireland we have Dreamed of’). As has been pointed out by several commentators, the Ireland Dev was recalling was that of rural Munster in the late nineteenth century, stable and reasonably prosperous in a frugal way. It was more the priest-led village Ireland of Canon Sheehan or the Knocknagow of Charles Kickham and Matt the Thrasher, rather than the semi-pagan, poor but free-wheeling society portrayed by Tomás or Maurice and the other writers. The paradox of the western islands of the Blaskets, of western Connacht and Donegal was that much of their cultural achievement was fostered by foreign academics driven by a romanticisation of western Irish popular culture, but irresistible in a cleaned-up form, purged of its Rabelaisian features, to puritan Irish Catholic nationalists. The ‘Playboy’ riots of 1907 reflected a real conflict between puritan and romantic currents in Irish society at the time.

TG

Notes

1Muiris Mac Conghail, The Blaskets: People and Literature (Dublin: Country House, 1994), pp.142–3.

2Tomás O Criomhthain, Allagar na hInise (Dublin: An Gum, 1928). Island Cross-Talk, trans. Tim Enright (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). Robin Flower, The Western Island (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1944). The latter is an essential introduction to these writers and their community. Muiris Mac Conghail, The Blaskets: People and Literature is equally necessary. I am indebted to Muiris for many conversations over many years about this topic.

3Tomás O Criomhthain, An tOileánach (Dublin: Educational Company of Ireland, 1929). Tomás O’Crohan, The Islandman, trans. Robin Flower [1937] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).

4Tomás O’Crohan, The Islandman, trans. Robin Flower (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp.243–4.

5Maurice O’Sullivan, Twenty Years A-Growing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953, first published 1933), p.221.

6Eibhlís Ní Súilleabháin, Letters From the Great Blasket (Cork and Dublin: Mercier, n.d.,1978). The Gaelic originals have not been published.

7See O’Sullivan, Twenty Years A-Growing, pp.167–170.