Aran Islander Bridget Dirrane was five years old the last time a new century was born. This time she is 105. Ask her did she expect to live so long and she says, "not really, but my sister Julia did live to be 100". It is a cold, bright December day in Galway and at St Francis Rest Home, Newcastle, on the Oughterard Road, Bridget Dirrane has decided to stay in bed. A life-long career nurse, she is now a patient: "I can walk but not as well as I did." She is also the first resident to have been conferred with an honorary MA degree. "We had the ceremony here. It was great excitement, a real party." The cap and gown reside in a glass case in the lobby. A portrait of her hangs in the dining-room. There is another over her bed.

She lies in the middle bed of three in a cheerful looking room with a television set. A bright balloon announces Happy 105th Birthday - you don't see many of those. A formal thank-you card from Jean Kennedy Smith and her family, expressing gratitude "for your sympathy and prayers for John, Carolyn and Lauren" is pinned to the wall. Tiny and white-haired, with two pairs of rosary beads around her neck, Bridget is curious, interested to see who is coming in. Staff nurse Teresa Walsh helps raise her slightly in the bed, she says, "she's one of my bodyguards, herself and Nurse (Kathleen) Conlon".

As the nurse leaves, Bridget settles back to tell the story of her life, a life that coincided with two world wars as well as space exploration and a range of inventions which have totally changed the face of Ireland and of the world in her life time. She stretches her elegant, fine hands out on the cover. Her long, well-shaped nails are painted bright pink. "Very dramatic," I comment, but she says, "I don't like them. They're too long. You can't do anything with them. Given the chance, I'd cut them off."

The youngest of eight children, she was born Bridget Gillan in 1894, three years before a neighbour who would become very famous, writer Liam O'Flaherty. "We lived in Oatquarter, he lived in Gort na gCappall. She says she never read any of his books. "I didn't need to, I knew the life he was writing about, we were living it ourselves." Her father was a weaver, "and Liam O'Flaherty wore clothes made from the cloth my father wove". All her life, despite the long years in the US, she never forgot that she is an islander. "All of my people are buried there, and I will be as well. It is the best place in the world."

The Aran of her childhood was poor, although there was always plenty of fish and potatoes. "Life has changed on the island, there's all kinds of things now. Washing machines and cars, and you can take a plane out there now - they weren't there when I was growing up." Tourism changed everything she says, but there was something else. "What I remember is the short, dark, wet, cold days of winter and the long, hot, bright days of summer. And there's also something which I can't explain . . . When I was young, we used to have these tremendous storms. Powerful storms, they'd light up the sky. For some reason, they don't happen anymore. I don't know why, but the weather has changed."

Among the photographs are pictures of her three step-grandchildren. Dirrane lives in the present and is more interested in speaking about these children and the plans she has for the family home than she is in discussing the past. But as she says: "I know people are interested in the past." For this reason, she wrote her memoirs, A Woman of Aran, at the age of 103. The book proved a best-seller.

On her first day at Oatquarter National School, at three, she arrived high on the shoulders of her eldest and favourite brother, Pat. "The school seemed a huge place. I was wearing a lovely pair of black patent shoes that had come from England." The teacher gave her a slate to write on. Irish was her first language. "I didn't much like school. I knew from an early age I wanted to be a nurse, out helping people. I had the knack of it. I knew the cures, as my mother had. I left school at 14."

Her father and her Uncle George were both weavers, the Gillan family had always been the island weavers. Explaining how the bobbins of yarn were needed to make up the flannel, she says: "I often used to wind the bobbins myself." The yarn had to be warped first and then fitted into the loom and from that it became flannel. She was about eight when her father died, but far worse was the loss of her brother, Pat. Years later another sudden death would shock her.

"I had come home from Dublin and I was staying in Galway for the night. My brother George was there as well. It was a wet night and I asked him to come to the guest house with me. But he insisted in going off into the rain with some friends of us. He had had pneumonia when he was young. The next morning I was told he was dead." Most of the people she knew are now dead, and she often refers to ghosts. "Sometimes I see them, sometimes I don't."

Drownings are less dominant in her memories than might be expected. "I've always loved the sea. There was a great fear of death by drowning, but they were rare enough." One of her cousins drowned while out fishing and she remembers the day four men were lost when their currach was destroyed by a wave, "one of them was only two months married and he was going to have the marriage registered". But most of the deaths were from illness, particularly pneumonia; "children often just died and there was nothing could be done".

Wakes were a fact of life, as well as a social event dominated by ritual such as the keening, a sound which seemed to travel on the night air. There is nothing fatalistic about her memories; her attitude is matter of fact and direct. "They're all gone and I'm the only one left." Although she followed her mother everywhere, she was not the favourite. Again, it it simply something she accepts; there is no regret.

As a young girl she made tea for Padraig Pearse and also remembers Thomas Ashe and Thomas McDonagh "and some of the others who also died in 1916". Although still living on Aran when the Rising broke out, she was aware of what was happening. "I was sympathetic to it and was already a nationalist." She was also approaching her late teens. It was time to leave home. Was she nervous? "I had been to Galway by boat a few times and I'd worked gathering seaweed. I'd also worked minding the grandchild of Dr O'Brien. He was pleased with me and asked if I'd go to Tuam to mind his son's children."

After a few months in Tuam, minding those children, she left after a dispute with the lady of the house. "She was English and did not like me teaching the children Irish." Bridget set off to join her sister who was working as a housekeeper for a priest in Tipperary. She took over, and Julia returned to Aran. Her new boss, the parish priest, was committed to Sinn Fein, and Bridget joined Cumann na mBan. By then, the Black and Tans had arrived.

By the time she went to Dublin to train as a nurse at St Ultan's Children's Hospital, where the nurses were trained on the job by doctors, the Black and Tans were already aware of her activities. She remembers reading a letter describing political events back on Aran when soldiers burst into the house. Proud of her insolent reply to the arresting officer, she recalls being taken from the house and being loaded into a truck. Eventually she was brought to the Bridewell. Was she frightened?

"Not at all, but the Bridewell was filthy. I was left there for two days. they gave me tea but I couldn't drink it, the cup was green and scummy. Then I was brought to Mountjoy - at least it was cleaner." There she began a hunger strike. A doctor ordered she be given two bottles of milk a day. "I never drank it, I used to give it to this crazy little woman who was put in charge of me. But she was a drunk, she drank the milk as well," and she laughs at the memory of the strange little woman.

Bridget spent a few months in jail. Probably her strongest memory from that time is standing outside Mountjoy as the young Kevin Barry walked to his death. "We heard the death bell and then there was silence."

What was she like as girl? "I was lively. I loved singing and dancing. I was hefty enough, about as tall as my nurse"( about five foot three or so) "and I wasn't bad looking except for my long nose. When my mother was cross with me, she'd say, `oh you and your long nose'. " She remembers the Four Courts in flames and was opposed to the Treaty. How does she feel about the peace now and the giving up of the territorial claim on the North? "You can't give part of the country away. It's Ireland. But I suppose sacrifice has to be made in the name of peace, if it is peace." Of all the men involved in the cause of Ireland, the one she admires most was Eamon de Valera.

In 1927, at the age of 33, she set sail for America from Cobh. The ticket cost £12. Emigration for her was not flight. It was an adventure.

"I wasn't leaving Aran. I had been working in Dublin. I was going to continue my nursing career in Boston." Having passed the medical at New York, she travelled to Boston where many Irish had already settled. Finding work was easy and she was soon suffering from exhaustion. She had a holiday in Florida. But the attractions of the States would soon be affected by the Depression. Again she is matter-of-fact about this. She enjoys talking, wants me to have tea and is patient, constantly leaning towards me, telling me to speak up - "have you finished your sandwiches?" - and is amused at some of the more bizarre mishearings of questions. She refers to one of her two roomates as "a little elderly lady in her 80s".

Soon after arriving in Boston she met a neighbour from Aran, Ned Dirrane. They began going out together, nothing too hectic, about once every two weeks. They decided to get married. It was 1932; she was 38. "I wore a pink dress and we had a lovely day, with lots of dancing." But after only eight years of marriage, Ned died suddenly. They had had no children, and Bridget continued working as she always had. The war in Europe had already started, and the US would soon be entering it. For two years she worked as the nurse on duty in a munitions factory where the unskilled workers, mainly women, were prone to hand injuries. Later she tended soldiers in an airforce base in Mississippi.

Her life in America was about work. Nursing took her everywhere. In late middle age, she learnt to drive. "I had this big Oldsmobile. I had it on Aran for a time." While she never forgot Aran, she seems to have become involved in a south Boston Irish community, which was a self-contained unit within American life, and took out citizenship. John F. Kennedy impressed her and for a time symbolised a new beginning. His Boston connections made him even more real. She canvassed for him. Does she remember the day he was killed?

`I was working in a room with another woman. We were folding sheets. The radio was on and we heard the shots on the radio as it was happening. We were shocked and started crying. It was a horrible day."

By 1966, after 39 years in America, she decided it was time to go home. She was then 72. Life on Aran had not stood still during her absence, there was now electricity and running water. She moved in with her brother-in-law, Pat, then a widower. Each of his three sons were abroad. So, some 34 years after her first wedding, she married another Dirrane and settled in Cliff Edge Cottage. Widowed for the second time in 1990, Bridget continued to live for a time at the cottage with her step-son's family.

At her sharpest when speaking about the Peace Process, she is also forthright on the subject of the recent nurses' strike. "That should never have happened. Nurses work hard. I know. I was one. I'm not an easy patient to look after. It's a hard, dirty job; cleaning, changing and feeding me. Nurses should be paid well. It's heavy, physical, often unpleasant work."

Milk pudding is her favourite meal. Bridget eats slowly, tidily and folds up her napkin. "That will do me the next time" she says. Looking at her directly as she lies in the bed, she is animated and insists I finish my food. Reflected in the mirror across the room however, she looks like a ghost. It is an unsettling trick of the light.

Prayer has helped her accept everything, including having no children. "My life has not been hard. The worst thing that happened was the sudden death of my brother George."

What is it like to have lived for so long? She laughs and says she wouldn't mind living a few years longer. "The children like having a grandmother. I'd like to live on a couple of years more for them." Is she frightened of death? "No. There's nothing to fear." She speaks of ghosts and yet it is not clear to me whether she has ever seen one. Has she ever seen God? "No not all. He is surrounded by light. It would be far too bright to look on God. You only see God when you die. No one could look on the face of God and live to talk about it."

A Woman of Aran by Bridget Dirrane published by Blackwater Press