A REAL SLICE OF ISLAND LIFE
A unique bus tour on Inishmore with an authentic lifelong islander behind the wheel is informative, entertaining and, most of all, fun
WE’RE making our way down Kilronan Pier on Inishmore, one of the Aran Islands, when we see the Hop On Hop Off Island Safari bus.
Or, more precisely, the driver sees us. He’s scouting for business and wants to know the day plan.
‘I’ll show you the whole island,’ he says with a salesman’s confidence.
We need to eat, I tell him, giving us an out. ‘We have a stop in Kilmurray, you’ll find all you can eat there.’
It’s either another, better excuse or we take the path of least resistance. Myself and my mother exchange a look of ‘sure we might as well’, and board the island bus tour.
‘I’m Máirtín Mullen but nobody calls me that — it’s Máirtín Polín Tom,’ he reveals. ‘Like in India, here on Aran, islanders attach the father’s first name to their own.
‘Now lads, welcome to the island. I’m an outand-out alcoholic so keep the money for a little while — the only thing that’s keeping me from the counter is the money,’ the islander chuckles. Seconds later, he’s singing a line from a Van Morrison song: ‘Mama told me, there’ll be days like this.’
Two English women seated in front of us exchange eyerolls. The Italians on the other side of them can’t understand a word he’s saying. ‘Speak slowly,’ they plead.
He carries on with the commentary, telling us that Inishmore’s 47 sq km accommodates 13 villages and is home to 900 people.
Leaving the pier behind, the bus passes a long string of tourists loaded with backpacks and wheelie-bags walking purposefully in one direction.
‘The pods are very popular — when something becomes fashionable, it doesn’t matter what it’s like,’ our driver says drily.
The Camping and Glamping facility is new on the island, a stark contrast to avenues for livelihood available to natives in generations gone by.
Over centuries, they built up the island’s 5,000km of drystone walls, and to turn fields of limestone into tillable land, for growing potatoes, rye and oats, the people brought seaweed and sand from the beach to make soil. The grassy topography endures and, with it, a history of labour and the commons
‘Boston, Dorchester, West 4th Street — that’s where my people were,’ Máirtín tells us, before going on to lament the fishing industry’s dramatic decline in recent years.
With proceeds from the sale of a trawler, former fishermen like Máirtín have been able to buy buses for ferrying tourists around the island. If Máirtín’s gift of the gab is an island tour industry standard, the men have adapted fast to their new profession.
We’re down on the beach with a pack of tourists, gawking at a seal colony. We watch several of them splayed out on large flat rocks that rise a foot or two out of the water and catch glimpses of their brethren clipping through the sea.
‘Sure what are you doing out here?’ Máirtín asks my mother when he finds out we’re from Salthill, across the bay in Galway City. Something revises in his demeanour, suggesting that the almost-locals aren’t the Safari’s intended audience.
He wants to know what I do for a living. When my mother tells him I’m home visiting from India, he asks for more information. ‘And what’s she doing out foreign?’ When I get back on the bus, my reputation — or least my profession — as a college professor, goes before me.
‘They’re very smart, the Indians, it must be some job teaching them,’ he says.
The MC tone of voice, and obligatory sense of humour, makes it difficult to read off sentiment — I can’t tell whether this is a compliment about their intelligence, or if is he implying something else.
We drive some more, and he gestures at a faraway point.
‘If it wasn’t up there, I wouldn’t be down here,’ he says, referring to Dún Aonghasa, the prehistoric fort at a dizzying height on top of an Atlantic seafacing cliff, built more than 3,000 years ago, and described by a 19th century artist George Petrie as ‘the most magnificent barbaric monument in Europe’.
The next site of interest is unspectacular, and not an obvious site for tourism, but its social history and relationship to job creation is uniquely interesting.
The modest building, set 20-odd metres in from the road, is a former factory where many women on the island went to work, manufacturing telephone instruments.
‘That building is responsible for keeping generations of people on the island,’ Máirtín says.
Next up, a place where goats cheese is made and, a few minutes later, a field that served as a shooting location for Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin.
When the main parish church comes into view, Máirtín explains how there used to be only two religions in Ireland.
‘Now we have three,’ he says. ‘We have good Catholics, we have bad Catholics and now, into the fray, we have lapsed Catholics.’
Soon after, Máirtín starts talking about the last sailing, signalling the Safari is nearing its end.
‘If you miss the boat, sometimes my darling is accommodating, sometimes not so accommodating,’ he says. Something or other gets muttered about ‘nocturnal gymnastics’ and being too old for them. Myself and my mother give each other the glance we’ve been exchanging since we boarded, the one that says ‘priceless’.
Whatever about the island tour, and what we did or didn’t see, it was a trip with Máirtín Poilín Tom, a real Man of Aran.
TRAVEL FACTS
Máirtín Poilín Tom’s bus tour of Inishmore costs €10.