LifeonthemarginsofIreland
HISTORIAN Diarmaid Ferriter will return to his Kerry roots when he discusses his new book, ‘On the Edge, Ireland’s Off-Shore Islands: A Modern History’ at Listowel this Friday evening.
It’s a topic close to Diarmaid’s heart as his grandfather hails from west Kerry, while he can recall summer trips to the Blasket Islands as a child.
“I remember being terrified going out in a small boat,” he said. “It stuck with me, and like a lot of people I was captured with the idea of a haunted, evacuated island. The more I got into history the more I was intrigued by them as they just seemed to illuminate a lot of the general themes I was interested in like communities living on the margins.”
The book has a strong Kerry slant, with several insights and depictions of life on the Blaskets and Valentia. Reference to Inishvickillane and Charles Haughey’s flirtation with island life is given context, while personal pleas by islanders direct to Éamon De Valera asking ‘to do more for us’ as ‘winter is coming’ feature in the years leading up to the eventual evacuation of the Blaskets in the early 1950s.
“We have all this rhetoric associated with the celebration of a distinctive Irishness on the islands and how they were supposed to be the essence of that. I was curious as to why so many of them were evacuated from there. By researching the islands you can illustrate an awful lot of the broader themes relating to Ireland after independence.”
Other chapters include the ‘Island Priest’, covering Fr James Enright’s relentless campaign for a bridge connecting Valentia Island with the mainland in the 1940s and ‘50s. Beginning in the 19th century and extending to the present day, each chapter comprehensively works towards a timeline of understanding about our relationship with the islands – many of which were treated like museum pieces by scores of intellectuals from Yeats and Synge, to photographers and government officials. The population of Ireland’s islands dropped by around 90 percent in the past 170 years.
Ferriter’s research creates two kinds of island life: one of human survival, and one of cultural abstraction. The latter relates to a decades-long attitude whereby island people were viewed as being symbolic of a purer sense of Irishness; while the former deals with human survival in absolute terms: squalid living conditions, intolerable winters and lack of opportunity are overwhelmingly at odds with convoluted notions of preserving ‘national identity’.
“The culture and the scenery and the way the language is spoken doesn’t butter parsnips. You can’t make a living from that,” he says.
“The revolutionary generation of 100 years ago used to make these pilgrimages to the islands to learn Irish and to get back the idea of an ancient Irish identity. But this wasn’t matched with any coherent policy for developing an island economy.
“There is no real sense that the islands’ potential is going to be recognised or realised by State support. They really are thrown on their own resources, which are limited. They are a remarkably resilient people with a strong sense of community.
“They have a distinct identity and a remarkable deftness and skill in how they manage living, often precariously. But if you’re a young person growing up in the islands in the 1920s and ‘30s, what are your options going to be? Even today the issues are often about access and education...it’s not all a narrative of gloom. But they do tend to come into our consciousness for reasons of neglect”
Diarmuid is a regular speaker at Listowel Writers’ Week, and he is very much looking forward to returning.
“There is something special about Listowel, and there is an appreciation for writing and what it can mean. That really rich and textured social history, you can do justice to it in a place like Listowel where there is such an appreciation for weaving all those threads together. I really value that.”
Diarmaid will give his talk at 7pm this Friday, November 30, at The Listowel Arms Hotel. Tickets are €10. Contact: 068 21074.