Peig tells stories full of anger, negativity and profanity, though only those that suited the tastes of what was a repressive time were printed, says Bourke. Had I known in advance half, or even one-third of what the future had in store for me, my heart wouldn't have been as gay or as courageous as it was in the beginning of my days." The opening doleful lines of her 1936 book, as dictated to her son, Maidhc, read: "I'm an old woman now with one foot in the grave and the other on its edge. Peig,was enough to induce despair and anguish in the hearts of many Leaving Cert students. The version of Peig depicted in her autobiography, Peig was the headline act on the Irish curriculum throughout the 1960s and 1970s, until she became the butt of jokes and a figure of ridicule. "It's a rehabilitation of Peig," says Malachy Moran, RTÉ Radio's manager of audio services and archives. It presents a fresher, earthier version of Peig, where her sense of fun and warmth come to the fore. The Blasket Islander is to be re-introduced to the public through a series of lectures and broadcasts throughout the next week.Ī new online archive exhibition has been launched on RTÉ's website using rare recordings of Peig made by Séamus Ennis and Seán Mac Reamoinn in 1947. PEIG SAYERS, the great storyteller who died 50 years ago on Monday, and who was the scourge and torment of Leaving Cert students for decades, is undergoing a makeover. In this village lived Tomâs Dhônaill Chonchuir Philip O Criomhthain - the Islandman : writer.ĮTUDES IRLANDAISES, n° 12, Décembre 1987, 155-164.Peig Sayers was long the bane of Irish secondary-school students, but now, on the 50th anniversary of her death, the great Blasket Island storyteller is undergoing something of a reappraisal, writes The social structure was a highly organised one the Island even had a King - not unusual in the social organization of islands off the West^ Coast. The village was snugly set into the hill with a school. In the 1901 census, the Island had a population of 145 persons : 85 males and 60 females. It is a sea journey of some three miles from Dun Chaoin to the Island harbour - Caladh an Oileâin. The Island is three and a quarter miles long, East by North, and two thirds of a mile in width at its widest point. ![]() The Great Blasket, or an tOilean Tiar, lies one mile off the coast at its closest point to the mainland at Dun Chaoin. The Blasket Islands are a cluster of islands off the South West coast of Kerry in the Barony of Corca Dhuibhne. ![]() ![]() The names of the principal Blasket writers are well known, Peig Sayers, Muiris O Suilleabhâin, and chief among them, Tomâs 6 Criomhthain (2). ![]() In translation, that Blasket Island vein now inhabits the world body of literature. In fact, state policy has generally been directed towards removing island communities to the This is in sharp contrast with the British practice, particularly in relation to the Gaelic speaking islands of Scotland.Īn tOilean Tiar, the Great Blasket Island, was for a short period an important vein in the body of Irish language literature. Since the foundation of the State, we have tended to look at islands as being remote from civilisation, and at those who dwell on them as being eccentric. O Criomhthain 's autobiography, An tOileânach - The Islandman, was first published in 1929. 1987 also marks the fifthieth anniversary of the death of the Island's most important inhabitant : the writer Tomâs O Criomhthain. This is a year in which Irish public opinion seems concerned for the first time about the future of the Blasket Islands (1).
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