![]() Further, all the islands had to be more intensively farmed in the past to enable them to support their greater populations and abandoned fields and lazy beds are mute testimony to this past pressure. Even islands still with people have empty houses, sometimes empty villages as on Dursey and Achill. Regarding landscapes, on the depopulated islands-Great Blasket, Finish, Scattery, Owey and scores of others-are silent, empty, largely tumbled, villages, standing in evocative echo of their lost society. This outpouring of people unwilling to put up further with the hardships of island life has left its mark, in both physical and other ways. In percentage terms, the population decline on Irish islands was minus 74.6 per cent, almost twice the rate of loss from Ireland as a whole, which was minus 37.6 per cent during this period. The 1841 census identified 211 inhabited islands with a total population of 38,138 in 1991 there were just sixty-six with about 9,700 people and many of these islands are now connected to the mainland by fixed links. Sometimes an island proved unable to sustain a viable society at all and complete depopulation resulted. Such over-stressed economies were not capable of much expansion and were increasingly unable to satisfy people who, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, became aware of the opportunities created by industrialisation in north-east Ireland and Britain, as well as the real or mythical opportunities of faraway America. No wonder then that in 1822 when bad weather caused the potatoes to fail, there was a crisis on the islands serious enough to require outside help. In short, the Aran Islands in 1821 displayed an economy which was stretched to its utmost with every feasible activity exploited. Otherwise on their islands which provided neither wood nor turf, the islanders burnt bualtrach (cow dung), which would be dried on walls. Wrack (material washed ashore) was avidly gathered-providing wood for building or fuel, for example. Further activities not recorded in the census, but known to have existed included sealing, the taking of seabirds and illicit distilling. Kelpmaking was an important feature of the Aran economy as it produced cash, needed to meet rental payments. The secondary jobs, in addition to farming, were usually as fishermen and/or kelpmakers (kelp is seaweed which was gathered, dried and burnt to ash, from which iodine and other by-products were extracted). Further, the farmers did not own their holdings, the islands belonged to an absentee landlord in Dublin. Loose rocks would be crafted into the famous Aran drystone walls to protect the precious soil. Holdings were not that small for rural Ireland, the mean holding size for the three islands being 11.3 ha, but the land often had to be ‘made’, by creating artificial soil on the islands’ bare limestone by spreading layers of sand and seaweed onto the rock surface. Sixty per cent of household heads worked the land, but most had to have other jobs, for agriculture on Aran was not an easy affair. Apart from full-time fishermen, mainly in Killeaney village, Inishmore, a number of labourers and some people, mainly widows, who made fishing nets, few people had only one recorded occupation. They show a subsistence, peasant society where the few resources available had to be exploited to the utmost. The unusual survival of census documents from 1821 for the Aran Islands demonstrates this clearly. Island life was especially hard in the past. These have always been what Americans would call ‘hardscrabble’ places. Ó Héalaí has edited these transcripts and translated them into English, and there is no doubt will they add to giving Peig her deserved and appropriate place in Irish culture.The ‘island of dreams’ notion hardly applies to the small islands off the north and west coasts of Ireland. These remastered recordings will be available in CD format along with the book. In part two of this Peig Sayers revival, Pádraig Ó Héalaí has used remastered recordings of Peig made in 1952 by the Irish Folklore Commission to produce an accurate, lively and illuminating representation of Peig’s unique style of oral storytelling. It was only after Pádraig Ó Héalaí and Bo Almqvist’s authentic edition of her stories was published in 2008 by New Island, that her contribution to Irish literary history and culture enjoyed a better assessment and her tales found a new audience worldwide. As a result they often became the object of satire―such as Flann O’Brien’s The Poor Mouth―or the cause of unhappy memories for students confronted with the school book version of her recollections. Peig’s recollections were never written down but dictated to others, and in the process often edited or shortened. Flaherty (Man of Aran) is one of the three towering figures that became celebrated by the late Gaelic Revival. Peig Sayers, together with Tomás Ó Chriomhthain (The Islandman) and Robert J. ![]()
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