Seagulls as Playmates

‘Ireland 1972’ by Josef Koudelka

The statistics​ for the decline in people working on the land in Europe are stark. In Remembering Peasants, Patrick Joyce reports that in 1950 nearly half the population of Spain were agricultural workers. By 1980 the figure was 14.5 per cent; by 2020 it was less than 5 per cent. In France the proportion of people working in agriculture was 23 per cent in 1950 and 3 per cent in 2019. So much has changed in the last few decades. ‘The EU,’ Joyce writes, ‘lost 37 per cent of its farms between 2005 and 2020, almost all of which were tiny holdings, less than five hectares.’ Many of those who came from the land went to work in factories and in retail. The town of Westport in County Mayo is close to where Joyce’s father was born. ‘In the town,’ he writes, there is a factory that ‘produces the entire world’s production of Botox … This is a world beyond the imagination of the parents and grandparents of those who work there, and one scarcely credible to me.’

The actual world of the peasant has itself often seemed scarcely credible to outsiders. In 1933, Luis Buñuel made a documentary about an area in Extremadura near the Portuguese border. The film was called Las Hurdes: Tierra Sin Pan, or Land Without Bread. The place was so poor, Buñuel said, that ‘I didn’t find a single drawing, nor a song, nor a firearm. At the same time, they don’t make bread. It was an almost neolithic culture, without folklore, nor artistic manifestation of any sort. The sole tool which they possessed was the plough.’ In Spain, as in Ireland, bad land lay in sight of fertile land, making generalisations about peasant life difficult. Buñuel’s biographer John Baxter writes about Las Hurdes: ‘The lowlands, Las Hurdes Bajas, were lush and prosperous, but the flinty uplands behind them, Las Hurdes Altas, were among the most deprived areas in Spain. The peasants … lived in medieval conditions, ravaged by malnutrition, malaria and inbreeding, and almost without a culture.’

While peasants in Las Hurdes Altas had much to resent, the place was a godsend to writers and filmmakers. The novelist and poet Miguel de Unamuno wrote about it in 1922. Three years later Alfonso XIII paid a visit to the region at the urging of the writer Gregorio Marañón; shocked by the poverty, the king ordered the first road to be built. ‘Work went slowly,’ Baxter writes. ‘Spain seemed almost to prefer Las Hurdes in its primitive state. Marañón, a bullfight aficionado and cultural traditionalist, regarded it as Spain in its purest form, and even Unamuno suggested that in its misery something of the nation’s ancient soul and dignity was revealed.’

When Miguel Delibes set a novel called The Holy Innocents in Las Hurdes Altas, in a period that appears to be the 1960s, it seemed that little had changed. (The book was published in Spanish in 1981; the English translation by Peter Bush comes out this summer.) As a landlord and his guests languorously discuss peasants and their lack of culture, he boasts that there are no illiterates among his tenants, and to prove it he invites some of them to the dining room to display their literacy by writing their names. One of the women, however, ‘had trouble gripping the pen with her flat, stubby thumb with no fingerprint, yet haltingly, she still managed to write her name’. Her thumb is ‘as flat as a spatula’. When a guest stares at it, astonished, the landlord explains: ‘Ah you know, the thumbs of the women working with esparto grass are like that … it comes with the job, their fingers are deformed by all the grass braiding, it can’t be helped.’

Images of even greater deformity and lurid cruelty had abounded in Buñuel’s film fifty years earlier. As an example of joyous peasant culture, we see local young men vying to pull the head off a chicken suspended on a wire across the street. We see a filthy pig wallowing on the banks of the stream that runs through the village and then watch a child drink water from it. The peasants, who are superstitious, will only eat goats that have fallen to their death from the steep slopes. Buñuel points the camera at a goat about to risk the next precarious step, as though self-consciously for the camera, before it loses its footing and falls. He also finds a donkey being stung to death by bees. (Sour honey was the main export from the region.) The voiceover, accompanied by a piece of Brahms, announces that a group of shepherds in the film are, in fact, cretins; Buñuel lingeringly films their faces to ensure we are not in any doubt.

‘These graceless mountains fascinated me,’ Buñuel wrote in his memoirs, ‘as did the poverty and the intelligence of their inhabitants. I was amazed at their fierce attachment to this sterile country.’ The film didn’t win any admirers among the authorities (‘Why don’t you show something nice, like folk dances?’ he was asked), but it served Buñuel’s purposes in his roles as both Surrealist artist and political activist. It is filled with grotesque and comic images, and at the same time shows that the only wealth in the region belongs to the Church. While the Church grows fat, the peasants starve. As for folk dances, Buñuel writes, ‘Las Hurdes didn’t have any.’

Buñuel makes clear his distance from the poverty he filmed. He himself was a little posh boy: ‘Even when I went to my music lesson, my governess always carried the violin case.’ His father, who had made a fortune in Cuba, had built an Art Deco house in a village in Aragón and a country house not far away. As they travelled from one house to another, ‘our children’s cart often passed a thin village child dressed in rags who was collecting horse manure in a shapeless basket to fertilise his family’s scanty vegetable garden. When I think back, it seems to me that these images of abject poverty made no impression on us whatsoever.’

Joyce, too, comes to his study of peasants from a place of privilege. He is an emeritus professor of history at the University of Manchester, but since he has extended family in a remote part of County Mayo, he has visited throughout his life with a sense that, despite living in England, Mayo is where he comes from. This makes him a witness as much as a historian and allows him to write both wistfully and unsentimentally about what he calls ‘this falling silent of the countryside’. He quotes Ronald Blythe, the author of Akenfield, about rural England: ‘Some of it will be missed; the part that cannot be put into words.’

In Remembering Peasants and his earlier Going to My Father’s House: A History of My Times (2021), Joyce explores the ways in which this silence can be described and investigated, perhaps even disrupted. Going to My Father’s House opens with a photograph by Josef Koudelka called Ireland 1972. It shows three men who have climbed the holy mountain Croagh Patrick overlooking Clew Bay in Mayo. Most pilgrims make the climb on the last Sunday in July. This great religious outing is a gift to a photographer in search of the primitive image of figures at prayer in a stony landscape. The picture of three men on their knees leaning on blackthorn sticks in this windswept place suggests, above all, timelessness, an Ireland unbrushed by modernity even in 1972. Croagh Patrick has, as Joyce writes, ‘been a place of Christian pilgrimage for over a millennium and a half. Before then it was a sacred place for perhaps twice that time.’

Koudelka, he writes, was ‘an in-between person, having fled from Prague after the Russian invasion of 1968 and then taken up a relentlessly peripatetic professional life as a photographer’. The men in the photograph are not named: that would be to ruin the whole show, allowing for the possibility that they went home afterwards and did something other than kneel and pray in grim weather. ‘Just as the people in the photograph are caught in a precise moment of time,’ Joyce writes, ‘they are also outside time.’ But of course they aren’t outside time: they just look like they are. Joyce begins by identifying them simply as men from the west of Ireland who work the land. He then reveals their names: ‘The younger man on the right is my first cousin Seán Joyce … the man on the left Paddy Kenny, the husband of Seán’s sister … The third man, in the middle, is a neighbour of Paddy’s, Máirtín Maingín … All three men have now died … Carrying their mark – the height of my kin, their black hair – I share these bodies, our genes, a collective deep history.’

Joyce’s father was born in 1907 in south Mayo. His grandfather doesn’t appear in the 1911 census: he was in Pittsburgh with his eldest son, Pat. ‘My grandfather crossed over and back more than once in those days, to Pittsburgh and its steel mills, in search of work.’ Pat ‘was to die in these mills, crushed to death in the railway yard of Carnegie’s steelworks’. His mother was born Catherine Bowe in County Wexford in 1910, near where the rivers Barrow and Suir merge. Joyce was born in England in 1945 and was first taken to visit Mayo when he was three.

In his books, he is precise about placenames and more content dealing with a parish or a townland or a single part of a city than a sweeping moment in history. ‘For my emigrant mother and my father, the departed Irish places remained the guiding star of who they were and what they became, for it seems true that our sense of place becomes most active when we are “out” of place. To the emigrant, who is by definition always out of place and denied home, this sense is always keen, and is often passed on to the second generation.’ But he is also conscious that he may himself embody a sweeping moment in history. He draws on Eric Hobsbawm, who recognised that this change – ‘the death of the peasantry’ – is ‘perhaps the most fundamental one the contemporary modern world has seen’. Joyce thinks of himself as a historian of his own life: ‘I have seen this world we have lost, and been part of its ending. The Joyces and the Bowes – both sides of my family – were part of this silently epochal transformation. In my family history I am the link between old and new, the first-born of the new, and yet a carrier of the old.’

Still, he avoids easy nostalgia. When he asks about what has disappeared – ‘How might we remember, retain and preserve?’ – he isn’t suggesting building a heritage park, but rather acknowledging the past in a way that makes it sharp, exact, almost real. Teasing out these slippery questions leads him to write in a way that is unusual for an Irish or even English historian: ‘After all, only the past has existed, and so only the past is real … Past and present seem in truth to be in coexistence, in mutual dependence, so that we might think of the past as always coiled within us. It is ever ready to unfurl, so that the past in this sense has not passed, and is constantly happening in all our presents. One answer to why we should retain and linger alongside the dead is that they linger in and retain us.’

Joyce notes that his own forebears would not have used the term ‘peasant’ to describe themselves. The word is ‘tricky’, he writes. ‘The disgrace that some attach to the word “peasant” means that the word itself is shunned. This shunning is at bottom absurd.’ Having gone through the dictionary meaning and the word’s origins in the 12th-century Anglo-Norman, he concludes: ‘A peasant is a country person, a person of the land. That is all the word in its original innocence means.’ There is no point in labouring too long over Joyce’s use of ‘peasant’ – his definition is very broad – but there is, nonetheless, little he can do to rescue the word from some of its compound meanings, as in ‘peasant-faced’, or ‘O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I,’ or ‘peasant-minded’ (the OED cites ‘I am convinced that this peasant-minded religious zealot should be executed’ from the Sydney Morning Herald in 2010). Not to speak of the constant bantering cry after midnight in many Irish streets: ‘You’re only a fuckin’ peasant.’

The history of peasants can’t be disentangled from the history of the people who went to describe or photograph them. At the turn of the 20th century, J.M. Synge, referred to by Patrick Joyce as ‘that great theatrical fabulist of peasants’, took a camera with him to the Aran Islands off the coast of County Galway. He sought to capture the islanders in some natural state – not posing or dressing up. But he had difficulty persuading some of the locals. Of one man: ‘We nearly quarrelled because he wanted me to take his photograph in his Sunday clothes from Galway, instead of his native homespuns that become him far better, though he does not like them as they seem to connect him with the primitive life of the island.’

As he came to savour that primitive life, Synge found a kindred spirit, another Irish Protestant, who had come for the same reason: Lady Gregory. ‘I was staying there, gathering folklore, and talking to the people,’ she wrote, ‘and felt a real pang of indignation when I passed another outsider walking here and there, talking also to the people. I was jealous of not being alone on the island among the fishers and seaweed gatherers. I did not speak to the stranger nor was he inclined to speak to me. He also looked on me as an intruder.’

Synge paid attention to change, as any chronicler of peasant life must, and worried about it. Kilronan on Inishmore, the largest of the three islands, ‘has been so much changed by the fishing industry … that it has now very little to distinguish it from any fishing village on the west coast of Ireland. The other islands are more primitive, but even on them many changes are being made.’ He railed against ‘progress’, the sense that Ireland was being ‘Anglicised and civilised and brutalised’. Slowly, through a series of reforming pieces of legislation by the British government, the Irish rent-paying class were becoming smallholders. Peasants who leased land were becoming farmers who owned land, even if some of the newly created farms were small, and even if the two terms – peasant and farmer – resist easy definition.

In 1870, the year before Synge was born, only 3 per cent of Irish farmers, peasants or not, owned their own land; the rest were tenants. Within sixty years, the ratio had been reversed, with 97 per cent of farmers holding their farms in freehold. As land reform came to Ireland, an idea that was in the air grew more intense: that a special energy could be found on the islands – the Blasket Islands as well as Aran – and some of the edges of the western coastline. The idea is best described by Synge: ‘The continual passing in this island between the misery of last night and the splendour of today, seems to create an affinity between the moods of these people and the moods of varying rapture and dismay that are frequent in artists, and in certain forms of alienation.’ Joyce, however, insists: ‘The wild as our sublime makes no sense to the peasant.’

The idea​ that peasants can sing is a fundamental part of their aura or, some might claim, part of what defines them. A peasant sings; a farmer does not. Or at least a peasant may be someone who readily sings for an outsider. What made the story of Las Hurdes in Buñuel’s account so stark and sad was that there were no songs. They were peasants without songs. Joyce quotes an Italian on the folk songs of Calabria in 1950: ‘All the folk songs are laments, there is not a single popular song that has a sense of joy about it; they are all pervaded by a most profound sadness, by a harrowing melancholy which sometimes borders on despair.’ He writes about nights of singing and dancing in Donegal as described by the American writer Robert Bernen, who went to live there in the 1970s. ‘I am also moved by the image of those Donegal nights,’ Joyce writes, ‘because what I see is a life lived after dark, so that the senses and their place in remembering come into view again, literally so with sight; the life, the vivacity, of people is expressed in a world reversed, when the night that should be given up to sleep is given up to fun.’

In Ireland, too, there were times when outsiders reported that the songs stopped. In Connemara: A Little Gaelic Kingdom (2011), Tim Robinson wrote: ‘In the early 19th century travellers in Ireland used to remark on the habitual singing of the peasantry at work, and after the Famine the silence that had fallen on the countryside was heard as deeply sinister and mournful.’ Joyce refers to Robinson, who died in 2020, as ‘a renowned chronicler of Connemara and its vanishings’. In Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage (1986), Robinson produced a detailed map of Inishmore, marking every rock and cove. ‘Alone again, I have gone hunting for those rare places and times, the nodes at which the layers of experience touch and may be fused together,’ he wrote. ‘But I find that in a map such points and the energy that accomplishes such fusions … can, at the most, be invisible guides, benevolent ghosts, through the tangles of the explicit; they cannot themselves be shown or named.’

Both Joyce and Robinson write about the singer Joe Heaney from Carna on the coast of Connemara, whom Joyce heard sing ‘in the London of sixty years ago. Most of his singing was in Irish, but it did not matter to me as I listened, entranced, entering the world of my father, who had only recently died, through his singing.’ A quote from Heaney in Robinson’s book captures something of the world that fascinates Joyce: ‘My father was a very good singer,’ Heaney said. ‘In fact, he had more songs than I’ll ever hope to have. He died when I was thirteen [seventeen, in fact], so I had no hope of getting the songs because I thought I’d have plenty of time to get them off him. But they went to the grave with him. I heard him sing songs that I never heard since and I haven’t got myself.’

There were other people from whom Heaney could learn songs, of course, but this is a narrative about what has been lost, about strange, chthonic richness succeeded by erasure and silence. This became ironic rather than tragic when Heaney went to America and began to work with that master of manufactured silence, John Cage. Robinson calls the collaboration ‘the most eccentric point’ in Heaney’s ‘astonishing orbit’. ‘Could anything be further in origin and spirit from the world of Connemaran sean-nós?’ Cage was commissioned (by West German Radio and Pierre Boulez’s avant-garde foundation IRCAM) to create a composition based on Finnegans Wake. Cage, Robinson wrote, ‘was looking for Irish traditional music as an ingredient of his own musical recreation of [James] Joyce’s work, and when he was told that Joe Heaney was “the king of Irish music”, he pursued him to Norwich, where Joe was on tour, and swept him off to IRCAM’s prestigious base, the Centre Pompidou’.

The remote​ west of Ireland, so used to being left alone, seems to come alive for outsiders in search of something they had been studying and felt they had almost come to understand. George Thomson, an English scholar of Greek, went to the Blasket Islands in 1923. In the preface to his book Aeschylus and Athens, he mentioned the debt he owed to what Robert Kanigel in On an Irish Island: The Lost World of the Great Blasket (2012) calls Thomson’s ‘peasant-fisherman friends on the island’. They taught him, Thomson wrote, ‘among many other things that could not have been learned from books, what it is like to live in a pre-capitalist society … In general their traditions, especially their poetry, date from a time when social relations were profoundly different from those in which I have been brought up.’ His own judgment of Homer, he wrote, took its bearings from the Blaskets and the ‘ragged peasants’ he met. There, he said, ‘it was as though Homer had come alive.’

Robin Flower, another English scholar who came to the Blaskets (in 1910), also perceived this kind of timelessness or a connection to a time and a culture long passed. In The Irish Tradition, he described meeting an old man on a path on the island who, ‘without preamble or explanation’, began to recite Ossianic lays: ‘I listened spellbound and, as I listened, it came to me suddenly that there on the last inhabited piece of European land, looking out to the Atlantic horizon, I was hearing the oldest living tradition in the British Isles. So far as the record goes this matter in one form or another is older than the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf, and yet it lives still upon the lips of the peasantry.’ ‘I like to think of these tales as independent of time,’ Flower wrote to a friend in London,

existing in a kind of folk eternity and only accidentally localised and set in a temporal world. I get the sensation sometimes as I listen to the people rattling them off in the traditional style that by a kind of extension of wireless I am listening to innumerable voices long silent repeating, again and again, the old tales with constant local variation but no sense of the original intention.

In 1954, the islanders left the Great Blasket. It has been empty since then. What does ‘empty’ mean? What happens next in such places? How do historians deal with rapid change, with what is left when it starts to be called heritage? What do we do when even the victors didn’t bother writing history, let alone the dispossessed? Joyce writes about the dead in the Great Famine in County Donegal and those who grabbed their land. ‘No woman or man wants to die unheard, unremembered, without the hope that the future will somehow redress the wrongs done to them. There in Donegal it was the unheard who went quietest of all. It is up to us to speak for them.’ The problem then becomes: what should we say when we speak for them? In the last section of his book, teasing out what form this speaking might take, Joyce asks questions about heritage in the knowledge that ‘it is an uphill task, this questioning.’

He has it in for the notion of heritage as ‘the form of the past for those who have neither the time nor the interest to ask questions of it, and who do not understand that the past asks more questions of us than we do of it’. He is thinking of museums: ‘Heritage was knowable and measurable, especially when put in museums. It could be marketed: indeed, that was a large part of the point.’ In Ireland we waited a long time for a museum of the Famine: the National Famine Museum at Strokestown Park, which opened in 1994. Now, it is perhaps time to think of creating a museum of land-grabbing, even if such an institution might feel a little too close to home for some. In Going to My Father’s House, Joyce writes about the People’s History Museum in Manchester, ‘which has now rebranded itself as the “national museum of democracy”’:

Here the story is the familiar one of reform, the gaining of the vote, the worker unchained – a leftist Whig version of history that is still a resilient presence in this country … You wouldn’t think, in this people’s museum, that … generation after generation voted Conservative. What E.P. Thompson described as the ‘flag-saluting, foreigner-hating, peer-respecting side of the plebian mind’ finds no place here.

Heritage, Joyce writes, ‘is for those for whom the past is the same as them, who do not recognise its radical otherness, who do not hear its silences, who do not question’.

There is silence on the Great Blasket now. Or at least there are no people speaking. And there is not much to see: a few restored houses, a few ruins, a harmless heritage trail. In the early 20th century a number of islanders wrote famous books. Peig Sayers, Tomás O’Crohan and Maurice O’Sullivan got to write down their stories. Thomson, who co-translated O’Sullivan’s Twenty Years A-Growing, written in Irish and published in English in 1933 with an introduction by E.M. Forster, saw similarities between Homer and the Blasket autobiographies. Their achievement was, he said, ‘something new in Irish literature’.

And yet there had been no break with the past. What these writers did was to weave their autobiographical tales, told many times at the fireside, into a continuous narrative in book form. In this way, they succeeded … in carrying over into print the art of the spoken word. It was as if the old Gaelic world had become articulate just as it was about to expire. These books are the literature of a preliterate community.

It is hard, however, to be sure what the term ‘a preliterate community’ in the early 20th century might mean, even one on a remote island. Nothing comes pure. Thomson found a tattered copy of an English translation of the Decameron in O’Sullivan’s house on the island. Sayers’s son, Micheál Ó Gaoithín, translated six of Boccaccio’s stories into Irish in his late teens, ‘transposing them into an Irish setting’, according to the Dictionary of Irish Biography, ‘hibernicising the text and later even attributing one of the stories to himself. He often recounted these stories’ and a Swiss scholar ‘wrote one of them down’ from his mother in 1946. A regular visitor from the mainland brought Pierre Loti’s Pêcheur d’Islande, a fictional account of Breton fishermen off the coast of Iceland, as well as Maxim Gorky’s account of growing up in a peasant village, and gave them to O’Crohan before he wrote The Islandman (1934).

The Great Blasket​ , as it stands now, is a kind of anti-museum. The less that is added, the better it will be. It would be easy to arrive there and wonder why the island was left like that and where the islanders went. This ‘why’ and ‘where’ are both at the root of Joyce’s work. The importance of the Blasket story is, if such a thing is ever possible, that it seems we can answer these questions easily enough. Of the thirty final inhabitants of the Great Blasket, there was only one child. In 1949, a journalist described him as ‘the loneliest boy in the world – he has only seagulls as playmates.’ In his memoir, Gearóid Ó Catháin – the boy – outlined what happened next: ‘Overnight, my family and I became famous. An avalanche of post flooded in from all over the globe … letters, postcards and parcels of clothes, books, comics and toys.’

A rancher of Irish descent in America sought to adopt Ó Catháin, but his parents didn’t allow him to go. In The Loneliest Boy in the World, published in 2014, he writes about the winter of 1947, when a young man suffering from meningitis received no medical help because the island was cut off by storms and the telephone system was down. When he died, they couldn’t get a coffin to bury him because of the weather. By the time one arrived, decomposition had set in. When the young man’s father was asked the cause of death, he said that the government had killed him.

In April 1947 the islanders sent a telegram to the Taoiseach, Éamon de Valera: ‘Stormbound Distress Send Food Nothing to Eat Blaskets.’ De Valera had been to the island before, seeking refuge at the end of the Irish Civil War. In the summer of 1947, he visited again. Back in Dublin, he made it clear that he didn’t want the islanders to move to the mainland. But his officials took a different view. ‘They have no church, no priest, no doctor,’ one wrote in a memo in August 1947:

There is not a single tree on the island and probably not more than half a dozen bushes. They have not a public house, a cinema or a dance hall in which to find distraction from their woes … They are dying out and perhaps it is better for them so. I fear it is too late but I believe they could have been saved at relatively a very small cost.

He referred to them as ‘the ageing and despairing people of the Blaskets’ and suggested that ‘the Blaskets would be a good place for a holiday for anyone who is satisfied with simple pleasures.’

It took the government a while to act, but in 1953 most of the islanders had accepted accommodation on the mainland, and by 1954 there was no one left. Some of what happened next is described by Cole Moreton in Hungry for Home: Leaving the Blaskets, A Journey from the Edge of Ireland (2000). To say that the islanders were scattered is too simple. Moreton makes the point that they knew themselves to be set apart not just from the world, but from Ireland. John McGahern has written of The Islandman: ‘If the strong sense of the day, the endlessly recurring day, gives to the work its timeless quality, this is deepened still more by the fact that people and place seem to stand outside history. There is no sense of national pride. The distant rumblings of a new Ireland are brushed aside.’ When they came to Dingle, the nearest town on the mainland, the islanders tended to walk in single file, as they had on the Great Blasket’s narrow paths. They didn’t think this was as funny as some people in Dingle did.

On John Street in Dingle, Moreton writes, ‘there was a travel agent called Galvin who sold tickets for the transatlantic shipping lines, and his record book preserved the names of the thousands who passed through on their way to America.’ One of these passengers, an islander called Seán Ó Cearna, went to the US in 1901. He may be the person who guided the others towards Springfield, Massachusetts, which is where many of them went, just as people in Joyce’s part of Mayo settled in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Mícheál Ó Cearna, the brother of the young man who had died of meningitis, made the journey to Springfield in the late 1940s. His uncle, already in America, agreed to sponsor him. When he arrived, he told Moreton: ‘They had a big feed ready for me … They wanted to hear the news about home … What amazed me was I had more relatives in Springfield than I had back in Ireland. I had five aunts and three uncles there, and they all had big families.’

When Moreton arrived in Springfield, he not only met Ó Cearna but found ‘the entire island’. They had moved into a part of Springfield called Hungry Hill, which became, at least for a generation, a kind of island itself. In 1974, Sean Cahillane, one of the next generation of the Blasket-Americans, stood for election to the Massachusetts state government. He was the youngest and poorest in the race. He won his seat because ‘the Irish – west of Dingle, Blaskets … connection came in … The clan thing fell into line … Families would come to me because they had problems … The deep secrets. They knew that my folks came from west of Dingle and the Blaskets, and I’d keep my mouth shut.’

What is remarkable about the Blasket autobiographies, especially O’Crohan’s The Islandman, is the plainness of the language, its use of bare statement, its delight in telling rather than showing. They describe the weather, adventure, excitement, sex, death and comedy. McGahern wrote of O’Crohan’s book:

Nowhere in the work does he attempt to describe the little island he lives upon … I believe this fact to be linked with O’Crohan’s view of his world … The island is simply there as a human habitation, a bare foundation of earth on which people live and move … Places are seen in their essential outline, which is inseparable from their use or function … There are no idle stretches to be filled with contemplation of the daffodil … Unwittingly, through this island frame, we have been introduced into a complete representation of existence.

What troubles Joyce in his two books is the question of what it means when a world is lost. He looks abroad, and writes about a summer festival in southern Italy, an annual event for heritage tourism: ‘The universe of meaning that comprehended the reality of the past has been severed, leaving the old meanings as they were, now floating free and so available for appropriation in all manner of new ways.’ When the past can be erased, when peasant life in Europe can be diminished with such speed, Joyce is concerned about what this does to the very notion we have of the past. ‘Past time,’ he writes, ‘becomes something akin to a void, something that either people have no time for or wish to flee to as respite from the nowness pressing in on them.’

One of the things that makes life on the Blaskets hard to reimagine is that the letters home from those who left are unreliable – ‘always performing’, as Eavan Boland puts it in her poem ‘The Lost Art of Letter Writing’. And the songs about the Irish in America missing home were often written by people who had never set foot in the country. From those who left the Blaskets, we have two recent accounts: Ó Catháin’s The Loneliest Boy in the World, written with Patricia Ahern, and Carney’s From the Great Blasket to America (2013). Neither book has any of the originality of earlier Blasket autobiographies. At times, they show us just how highly wrought and literary the works of Sayers, O’Sullivan and O’Crohan are. (Names in this story move between Irish and English: Tomás O’Crohan can also be Tomás Ó Criomhthain, just as Michael Carney is also the Mícheál Ó Cearna who came to Springfield in the late 1940s and was interviewed by Moreton.)

Carney​ and Ó Catháin both write about where they lived after the island was cleared of people. They emerge as immensely good-humoured fellows; they seem to have been welcome everywhere they went. Carney went first to Dublin, where in 1937 he took a job as a barman in Davy Byrne’s pub on Duke Street, the same pub that was visited at lunchtime on 16 June 1904 by Leopold Bloom. Carney seems to have enjoyed the city. Among his customers were Brendan Behan and Patrick Kavanagh. He went to dances, football matches and the Abbey Theatre. ‘I had a great social life in Dublin.’ He hated it when the owners changed the back room of Davy Byrne’s into a cocktail lounge. And he disliked having to deal with drunks and people complaining. In Springfield, where he went in 1948, he worked for a supermarket chain. Within a few years, his brothers Maurice and Paddy came and then three more, Martin, Tom and Billy. Paddy, Tom and Billy started work at the Springfield Gas Light Company. Carney’s girlfriend, Mary, arrived from Dublin and they got married. They became American citizens. In 1975 Carney got a job at the new courthouse in Springfield, in charge of security at the entrance. ‘I got to know all the lawyers and the judges. I loved all the humorous give-and-take every day at work.’ He taught Irish classes and played Gaelic football. He raised money to build a Blasket Centre in Dunquin on the Dingle peninsula and became active in making sure that the Great Blasket did not, in private hands, become a sort of heritage resort. It would have been easy for him, and perhaps even tempting, to write about longing to be back on the Great Blasket. But he didn’t do that. He took it as natural that he had moved elsewhere. He liked Dublin and he liked Springfield. He doesn’t dwell on this, or protest too much. He liked the island too.

Ó Catháin stopped being the loneliest boy in the world, if he had ever been such, once he got onto the mainland. He liked the tourists who came to Dunquin in the summer. ‘Mixing with them was pure magic,’ he writes, ‘as they brought a certain sparkle and vibrancy to Dunquin which made me want to be like them when I grew up. I wanted to travel too, go on holiday, see many places, have fun and dress well.’ He went to work as a shop assistant in Cork. He played football and went to dances. He bought a motorbike. In later years, like Carney, he was offended at the idea that the Great Blasket could be bought or sold or developed as a resort.

Carney and Ó Catháin were both displaced into a kind of ordinariness. And for the next generation, brought up in Cork or Springfield, it all became both simpler and more complicated. Joyce is an example of that ambiguous state. Having been brought up in London, he moved to Manchester ‘as a young historical researcher’. ‘I came to the city in a sense to leave it, for no one lived in the dead inner city then, and being from the inner heart of London I scorned the suburbs.’ He moved to a village ‘some distance to the east’, which has been ‘my home for what has become almost four decades’.

The battle going on in his imagination between this new place and Ireland has been productive for him. He is a historian working against two types of forgetting. In Manchester today, he writes, ‘vast numbers bear an Irish name, and have an Irish ancestor, but have only the scantest knowledge, if any at all, of who has gone before them and the places their ancestors came from.’ He walked the decaying, decayed industrial city: ‘I had seen decay in London. I lived in the desolation of a razed Notting Dale in the late 1960s, but it did not compare to this vast clearance of souls, and of the houses in which they had once lived. All that was visible in the rotten mouth of the Manchester glacis were the public houses, left alone on the main roads out of the city.’ He is alert to traces and clues of industrial Manchester much as Robinson was to traces and clues in the landscape of the Aran Islands and Connemara. He is also alone, as Robinson often was in the west of Ireland, aware that this place has been lost twice, first in reality and then to memory. He writes about two industrial concerns that employed five thousand people between the world wars:

The two big works are separated by the railway line I take to the city. Utterly oblivious to what lies on either side of them, thousands upon thousands of rail passengers have over recent decades looked out unknowingly at the desolation on either side of them – desolation relieved only by the majesty of what remains … the vast, now empty and near derelict, boiler and tender shop building.

Close to the buildings is the A57, the road Joyce used to drive to work. ‘It is on this driven road, the banal A57, that I have dreamed much of my life – the driving daydream, the semi-automatic mind at work in the automated reverie.’

He is emphatic that the emptied-out, modernised places he writes about are not ‘non-places’. Even if they belong firmly to the past, it is a past that he tries to repossess, a past that Ciaran Carson insists on when he writes about Belfast: ‘At times it seems every inch of Belfast has been written on, erased and written on again.’ And once Joyce considers this past, which sits crouched in archives, he returns to Ireland in his memory and starts to wonder about his past, his parents’ past, and what it means to be, in his phrase, ‘denied home’.

Moreton teases out the same questions in an interview with Cahillane, the man whose mother had been born on the Blaskets and who in Springfield was elected to the state government. Moreton asked him what the word home meant to his mother. ‘Blasket Islands,’ he said at once. That suggested another question. What did the word home mean to him?

Er … I guess … I hesitate a little bit, but without being point blank on the question, for thirty years I have found myself referring to home as west of Dingle. And I wasn’t born there. A lot of my friends say the same thing: they talk about home as Dingle, but when you’re somewhere else, not in this community, and you’re talking about home it’s Hungry Hill. We’re Americans, no doubt about it. But we like being Irish too.