Ireland’s Forgotten Island, Revisited

By Antonia Moore.

When I was younger, my father, who was very full of Irish pride, would frequently take me aside to show me a favorite photo album of his. I was young and impatient and would squirm, antsy, in his lap as he did so. His trip to Ireland to visit where his parents came from was, not so obvious to me at the time, one of the pinnacle adventures of his life. We would flip through the pictures, taken with a disposable camera, of endless green, my father posing awkwardly next to his small and wrinkled uncle, framed by sheep as far as the eye could see. He would always explain, once we got to his favorite section, “The Blasket Island,” that this was where his mother grew up. I would politely feign interest and wait for him to move on, retaining very little of what he told me. One picture, of my aunt standing in front of a crumbling building, always stuck in my mind because of how silly a sweater she was wearing.

Recently, I was given the opportunity to study abroad in Ireland the summer before my senior year of college. When I had discussed it with my father, he was overjoyed to know I was going to be traveling to where his parents had come from. He went on and on, endlessly listing places and people and how they were all related, throwing me back to a time when he had told me all of this before. His mother lived on the Blasket Island, he would tell me, and his father lived on the main land of County Kerry. Stupidly, I still didn’t pay much attention. I was going to Dublin, the center of the Irish universe! An insignificant island off of the southwest coast was the least of my concerns at the time.

But as the date of departure neared, I started to get nervous. I wanted to take a piece of family with me so that I could make this trip vicariously special for my dad. And then it hit me: the picture of his sister. I asked to see it again.

The photo album was once again ceremoniously brought out and flipped expertly to the correct page. My father explained to me that this was a picture taken in front of his mother’s house on the island. I took it out of the album and asked if I could bring it with me. Avidly, my wish was granted.

I looked closer at the picture in my spare time. My aunt was wearing a huge, obnoxiously colored sweater in front of a cement building with no door, roof, or windows. But she was smiling. I decided I wanted to learn more and recreate this photograph for my father.

I left for Ireland at the end of June, with my picture tucked safely away, leaving home for the first time. I stayed at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, but never forgot for the seven weeks I stayed that I had a much more important journey ahead of me.

As the end of the program neared, I realized time was running out. I bought my train and bus tickets, and with a few fellow students in tow, I headed toward County Kerry to pursue the meaning behind the picture.

We arrived and stayed at An Oige (The Youth Hostel). Out of the window of our room, I could see the island, not too far away, blanketed in a teasing fog.

Courtesy: Google Images

 

The next day, I went to The Blasket Centre, a ten minute walk from where we were staying, to meet my cousin, Michael DeMohrda, for the first time.

When I walked in, I was greeted first by an enormous stained glass wall, representing the Blasket Island. The water, hills, and various houses were etched into large colorful pieces, and my cousin was waiting at the front desk for me. He was a middle-aged man with a thick head of dark hair, and was accompanied by a young blonde woman with a pair of headphones and a microphone. Michael approached me, shook my hand, and introduced me to the woman, Louise, who was from BBC Radio. She wanted to interview me for a piece she was producing about the Blasket Island. I was of particular interest because I was visiting where my grandmother came from for the first time. I was not the only one trying to rediscover something forgotten.

We carried through the museum, past plaques, posters, and displayed of island life. I learned the inhabitants were very self-sustaining, as getting to the main land in the flimsy wooden canoes was very dangerous and difficult. They lived, isolated, without running water or electricity for hundreds of years.  Pictures of crumbled rock buildings hung everywhere. Great autobiographers like Peg Seyers and Tomás Ó Criomhthain lived in such houses. From the main window of the museum, facing the island, I was able to look out over the water and see three very small white houses on a hill overlooking the coast. The smallest on the left, my cousin explained to me, was my grandmother’s.

Suddenly I couldn’t wait any longer. My childhood antsyness was once again getting the best of me. I wanted to get to the island to see where this picture was taken. It’s very rare a boat is able to make it to the Blasket because the water is so choppy. A friend in the group had warned me that she had tried to get out to the island in the past, but was denied access for almost four weeks. By some miracle, I got passage to the island right away. As I was rocking back and forth heavily on the boat, I couldn’t take my eyes away from the tiny white house that was getting bigger. This looming and monstrous place had been so vague to me all of these years, and just now was I realizing its importance. When the boat docked, we climbed the rocks to the village. At one time, the island was home to almost 300 people. Now, it was empty. It was abandoned in 1953, when the remaining ten people were evacuated because it was so dangerous to live in a place with such bad weather and few resources. I could only imagine that had become of the crumbling building I saw in the picture. Several other houses remained standing for the most part. The schoolhouse shared a wall with the childhood home of my grandmother, The Kearney house.

Courtesy: Google Images

 

As our tour guide brought us to the other living area of the island, we passed by a large and unmarked grassy area. He explained that this was where anyone who died unbaptized on the island was buried. Sometimes, the weather was so bad that people were unable to get their children to be baptized on the mainland for weeks, who would frequently die. An expert on the lineage of the families here, I was singled out by the guide and informed that two of my grandmother’s siblings were buried in this unmarked grave.

A chill washed over me from the damp winds and the discovery of the darkness in which my grandmother lived, still drawn in the direction of the houses I had seen in the distance. The island was an enormous time capsule and memorial. This feeling was only perpetuated as we passed a rock engraved in Irish, a portion of Tomás Ó Criomhthain’s “The Islandman”. It read, translated:

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 likes of it will never be seen again.

When I was finally close enough, I made a beeline for my grandmother’s house. It looked very different from the picture. It had been miraculously restored to its full originality from when she had lived there. Someone, very much in the spirit of the Gaelic League (who sought to restore and preserve Irish history and culture), had purchased my grandmother’s house to rebuild and repaint it. It had a second floor reinstalled with a set of stairs, and was given windows and a front door. The only thing that had changed from its original form was the running water and electricity that was installed, and I would not be allowed to go inside. Someone else owned a part of my history now.

I had only one requirement of my adventure of finding the source of this picture: take one of my own. I had intentionally worn clashing clothes in the spirit of my aunt, forcing a green crew neck to mesh with an orange shirt and purple pants. I had learned so much about my grandmother’s way of life, the history of the island, and how it changed since my grandmother left the island once and for all to pursue a better life in Springfield, Massachusetts for the sake of her family. I was able to appreciate much more of the meaning it had meant to my father.

When I returned home, I was able to make a photo album of my own, which I have just as enthusiastically displayed as my father always had. Now, it was my turn to sit him down, and flip to a page where the photograph of my aunt that had stayed with me through all of my travels sits proudly next to a picture of my own. Seeing the pride well up in my father as he gazed on the pictures made me understand how rewarding the time he had spent to show me this island’s importance was.

Courtesy: Antonia Moore and Thomas Moore

 

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