"A person's life races on in the exact same way that a wind lifts the mist from the shoulders of a mountain. My life, too, is nearly done. The gladness and gaiety, the run and the jump, the laughter and brightness and mirth area gone from me."
The words were written by Micheal O Guithin, son of Peig Sayers, as a lament not only ford his lost youth but for those years he spent on the Great Blasket Island off Kerry. The island - a mere three miles by one in size - is best known for its remarkable literary output. It finally died as a community in 1953, when the last of the islanders moved to the mainland.
The island and its peopled have come under renewed focus in Breandan Feiritear's documentary Deireadh an Ail (The last of the Brood) which was shown on RTE and will, in years to come, rank with Muiris Mac Conghail's documentary of more than a decade ago as an important piece of social history.
The work of Blasket born writers achieved widespread recognition. George Thompson, who translated Muiris O Suilleabhain's Fiche Bliain ag Fas, wrote of its literary tradition: "We have a small library the like of which is not to be found in any other language. They are books apart which have won a corner for themselves in international literature."
OGuithin, who moved to the mainland with Peig Sayers in 1942, died in Dingle in 1974. His recollections are contained in A Pity Youth Does Not Last which was a translation from the Irish version by Tim Enright and published by the Oxford University Press in 1982. It manages to capture the flavour of the island and the unique dialogue of its inhabitants.
Deprivations
The book also illustrates O Guithin's failure to settle not only in America but later on the mainland. For all its deprivations, the Great Blasket was his favourite place on earth.
He captured its mood in a poem, The Great Blasket, which was translated into English by Tim Enright.
Often with night's coming I am found
Where the sea gull sinks in settled sleep;
The black clouds mass above me
The evening star, polished, shines bright.
On the tide's brim fish are shoaling,
Darting, skimming each current
In midwinter the branch of evergreen
Covers the smooth hilltops of the
Great Blasket.
Women and men without malice of heart
Sup satisfied in houses not rented,
The spirit of freedom is firm, untrammelled and old on the
With young and old on the Great Blasket.
By all scripts of seers and druids.
The most famed in Ireland,
The tide spreads a mantle of silk
Around the Blasket Island.
OGuithin recalls the postman bringing news of the execution of the leaders of the 1916 Rising. "They preferred to die than see Dark Rosaleen in slavery," observed O Guithin's father. "She is the costly Dark Rosaleen to them," said a neighbour. "It is many a good: man that fell during the week for her."
An islander returning from London during the second World War gave his impression of life there. "You'd see the crowds out on the streets every day since the war started, with no place to go for the night, and their houses burnt to the ground by the big aeroplanes. They come over in black droves above them in the sky and toss down their balls of fire. The burning they cause is a terror to the world."
Married strangers
As the years went by, emigration and marriage outside of the island reduced the population. There was the time when two local girls married "strangers", causing a social upheaval within the community, according to O Guithin. "I'm telling you, reader, that the girls spared neither the rouge nor the billiantine. They would be eyeing one another to see which of them was done up to the best."
Despite the island's beauty, and the occasional gaiety of its people, life was harsh. In 1904, there were about 150 islanders, living mainly on mackerel fishing. In 1921, there were 400 currachs fishing off the west Kerry coast, but the number fell to 80 by 1934. For a community suffering badly from official neglect - there was no pier, shop, doctor, priest, church or school the economic writing was on the wall.
Eamon de Valera visited the island and it was agreed that evacuation was the only answer. Nobody wanted to stay, O Guithin writes. Even the old people preferred to be living on the mainland. The old men were dying and the old women too, and there was no one coming, nor any hope of them to fill the empty seats."
And so the curtain came down on a remarkable civilisation.