Lost sequel to classic tale of the Blaskets is found
A SEQUEL to the Irish literary classic Fiche Bliain Ag Fás will be published inside the next two years after the handwritten text was discovered among the papers of a dead priest.
The original, written by Muiris Ó Súilleabháin in 1933, was an Irish language memoir of the author’s life growing up on the Blasket islands off the coast of Kerry.
Ó Súilleabháin’s work, alongside similar books by Peig Sayers and Tomás Ó Criomhthain, detailed the islands’ history in the early part of the 20th century.
Ó Súilleabháin’s follow-up to Fiche Bliain Ag Fás – called Fiche Bliain Faoi Bhláth (Twenty Years A-Blooming) – remained unpublished at the time of his tragic death in June 1950 in Galway.
His only surviving child, Maura Llewelyn Kavanagh, told a local Kerry newspaper that the family believed it had been lost – until a few months ago.
It was when the manuscript turned up among the papers of academic priest Fr Padraig Ó Fiannachta two years ago that it was confirmed.
‘I received a phone call from a woman who then came to my house in Claregalway and handed me a copy of the manuscript.
‘It had been changed into the new cló [print] in Maynooth, which holds the original. I couldn’t believe it,’ she told Kerry’s Eye.
Ms Kavanagh said her late brother, Eoghan Ó Súilleabháin – the Abbey Theatre actor and twotime Jacobs Award winner – had taken the original manuscript to Dublin. ‘My mother used always be giving out that he [Eoghan] had lost it,’ she said.
The text, handwritten by the author, who drowned off the Connemara coast in 1950, is now with the publishing company An Sagart. Interim director Tadgh Ó Dubhshláine said: ‘The important thing is that it’s there now, it’s real. People always suspected that it had been written. Some even claimed they were actually aware of it, but until 2018 nobody knew where it was.
‘It wasn’t even a case of people actively looking for it as with the author’s unfortunate demise it was kind of forgotten about.
‘In some ways, it was an accident that it was discovered at all. Fr Ó Fiannachta was Professor of Modern Irish in Maynooth until 1992 when he went back to his native west Kerry and became parish priest of Dingle,’ he said.
‘He passed away in 2016 and his papers were left to An Sagart. It was maybe two years later by the time we got around to going through all of those – something which required a great deal of work – that we stumbled across it. It takes up from where the first one concluded – he’s just joined the guards and ends in such a way that it is fairly certain he envisaged a trilogy.
‘Ó Súilleabháin’s work was almost biblical, or Homeric, insofar as it took us back to a long lost era and chronicled it superbly. This is one of the most significant finds in decades. It will be a huge boost to the entire Gaeltacht community. It will take a little time to actually get it published and I’d expect that at some stage it will be translated into English like its predecessor.’
It took an appeal from the author’s agent to ensure the original book ever saw the light of day. Ó Súilleabháin’s bestknown work was first published in Dublin in April 1933. Twenty Years A-Growing, the English-language version, was published in London the following month.