There is something indefinably beguiling about our off-shore islands. They are part of Ireland and yet places apart, both geographically and metaphysically. To take the boat and cross the water for a period of only minutes is to make a journey in miniature: not leaving the country, but leaving the parent mainland for its scattered and unrelated offspring.
Tory is nine miles from the mainland, the farthest distant of our offshore islands. Tory islanders refer to travelling to the mainland as "going over to Ireland". The expression defines the place as removed from the mainland by something more elemental than simple geography.
Our islands have long provoked responses from those who have visited and felt inspired to transform their experiences there into something more lasting than scribbled postcards home. There is a rich seam of literature, music, film and visual art which has been engendered by our islands, and which has quietly accumulated in size to constitute a genre of its own.
Painter Derek Hill started visiting Tory in 1956, staying in a tiny isolated hut which had been originally built to monitor shipping during the first World War. One of his best-known pieces is the light-washed Tory Island from Tor More. "I cannot have a day without the need to spend several days entirely alone," he has said, and Tory always allowed him that utter solitude.
Apart from his own work on the island, Hill is famously credited with "discovering" or "inventing" the Tory Island School of Primitive Painters. When islander James Dixon saw Hill's work, the story goes that he remarked that he could do better himself. Hill encouraged Dixon and others to try doing just that, and several of the islanders went on to exhibit their "naive" art in trademark bold colours, to considerable international acclaim.
Whether the Tory painters would have set to work in such numbers without Hill's encouragement is perhaps an unanswerable question. But it does usually take visitors to discover new elements or perspectives about our own local place that we don't notice ourselves, being so familiar with the territory.
Some pieces of creative work inspired by the islands have gone on to inspire others in their turn. Tim Robinson, cartographer and writer, came to the Aran Islands in 1972 after seeing American Robert Flaherty's Man of Aran. Flaherty's "documentary" of life on Aran did use islanders as actors, but the life of the eponymous Man of Aran bore far more relation to fiction - and Flaherty's own agendas - than fact.
The book-jacket of Martin McDonagh's play, The Cripple of Inishmaan, is a still from Man of Aran. The play itself, which is set in 1934, is about Cripple Billy, who hears that Flaherty is filming on Inis Mor and whose heart's desire is to get a part in the film. It would, of course, have been possible for McDonagh to have written this play without there ever having been such a film shot on Inis Mor, but the fact that the audience knows Man of Aran exists undoubtedly gives The Cripple of Inishmaan extra dimensions.
In the play, McDonagh makes it clear what his own views on the film are. Says the character of Helen: "The Man of Aran me arsehole. `The Lass of Aran' they could've had, and the pretty lass of Aran. Not some oul shite about thick fellas fecking fishing."
When the postmistress on Inis Mor, Maire Bean Ui Chonghaile, told Tim Robinson that there was no proper map of the island, he set to mapping the place himself: "rescue archaeology" as he describes it. He has mapped Aran three times over now: once in his own unique cartography which mixes contours with lost place-names, and ancient forts with folklore; once in his book Stones of Aran, Pilgrimage, which explores the perimeter of the island; and most recently in Laby- rinth, which looks to the island's interior.
"There is something compulsive in one's relationship to an island," writes Robinson in Set- ting Foot on the Shores of Connemara. "A mainland area with its ambiguous or arbitrary boundaries doesn't constrain the attention in the same way. With an island, it is as if the surrounding ocean like a magnifying glass directs an intensified vision onto the narrow field of view. A little piece is cut out of the world, marked off in fact by its richness in significance."
On islands, it's much easier to get it wrong than right; clumsy observations find little place to shelter. But the English Robinson - commented Breandan O hEithir of Stones of Aran in an endorsement only a native islander could lend such generous weight to - "lovingly combines history, geography, folklore, archaeology, geology, linguistics, philosophy and almost every other branch of human learning to give a portrait of an island that will never be superseded".
Synge's place in the canon of island literature, particularly with The Aran Islands, and Riders to the Sea, is perhaps the best-documented of any others, hence its omission here. It was Yeats who famously told - or instructed - Synge to go to Aran. Yeats's own famous island was the exact opposite to the stark, exposed lines of limestone Aran. His lake isle of Inisfree is domestic and soft as a tamed pet; a reedy bulge of land that sits quietly in Lough Gill, the place that gave us his incantatory poem, The Lake Isle of Inisfree, which is recited the world over.
In the same way that Derek Hill became a catalyst for the Tory Island Painters, the writer Robin Flower encouraged the Blasket Islanders to capture the world around them, by interesting them in his own observations of the island.
Flower's book on the Great Blasket, The Western Island, was published in 1944, after Flower had spent some 20 years collecting material on his visits there. In his preface to the book, Flower records his debts to islanders Tomas O Crithin Criomhthain, and Peig Sayers. Flower had translated O Criomhthain's The Islandman in 1934. Peig had published her own book, Peig, a sgeal fein in 1936; the book which was destined - or doomed - to have a seminal influence on a generation of schoolgoers.
Sherkin Island was the setting for Sebastian Barry's long poem, Fanny Hawke Goes to the Mainland Forever, about a young woman who falls in love with a lithographer in Baltimore. She belongs to a group of people who have originally come from Manchester and settled on the island two generations previously. Barry developed the poem into his 1990 play, Pray- ers of Skerkin.
Prayers of Skerkin opened in the Abbey in November 1990. This reporter happened to be visiting Sherkin at the time the play was being advertised, and was told in the only pub there at the time that a delegation of islanders were going to the Abbey to see the play for themselves. They were afraid - an unfounded fear - that the play was contemporary and somehow centered on their own lives. The shadow of clumsy anthropologists lingers long.
Poet Richard Murphy has had a long association with Inishbofin, which provided him with material from much of his best-known work. The 1927 Cleggan tragedy, in which 25 fishermen were lost in a storm, inspired his long poem, The Cleggan Disaster, which is in his book Sailing to an Island. In the early 1960s, when Murphy wrote this poem, there were still people alive who remembered that October night.
He writes movingly of one of the broken boats still visible on the shingle: "She has not been fishing/ For thirty-four years/ The oars were turned into rafters/ For a roof stripped in the gale." The poem manages to be lament, ode, and social documentary.
Murphy also introduced other poets to Inishbofin, including Theodore Roethke, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. There is still a plaque in Day's Bar on Inishbofin which remembers Roethke's presence there, although it omits to mention the circumstances of the alcoholic Roethke's departure from the island: in a straitjacket, bound for a pyschiatric hospital in Ballinasloe.
There are many others who have come to our islands and distilled their impressions there later. Among them are the Belfast man Paul Henry, who came to Achill first in 1910 and painted the huge skies of The Potato Digger and Launching the Curragh there. "Achill spoke to me; it called to me as no place had ever done," he wrote in his autobiography. The Belgian artist Marie Howet came later, as did Derek Hill, and the German writer Heinrich Boll.
And then there are those islands that every Irish child learns the name of as soon as they go to school. The song is an anthem of childhood: Baidin Fheidh Limi, the journey of the doomed little boat that has made the names of Gola and Tory resound forever in our heads.
