IRELAND: The Last of the Blaskets

Off the storm-ravaged coast of Southwest Ireland lie the six fog-bound Blasket Isles,* where 14 centuries ago Ireland’s Celtic saints built Christian shrines of turf and mud to fend off pixies, pookas, hobgoblins and leprechauns. In 1588, a 1,000-ton Spanish galleon fleeing from the rout of the Spanish Armada piled up on the rocks of Great Blasket Island. Dozens of its crewmen struggled ashore, intermarried with the half-wild descendants of the “saints.” From their union evolved the modern Blasket Islanders: tall, rawboned Celtic fishermen who speak little but Gaelic but have the jet black hair and dark eyes of Spaniards.

Decimated by the Great Famine of 1845-48, which sent millions of Irish to the U.S., Blasket’s population has declined until there are now only 28 islanders left. In 20 years there have been only two marriages; in the village school, which once housed 30 pupils, there is now only one: five-year-old Gearoid Keane, whose cousin Patrick was the last King of the Blaskets (he died in 1930).

A French decision to ban the import of Irish shellfish shattered the Islanders’ chief livelihood: lobster fishing. Hard hit by the winter’s gales, unable to get food from the mainland, the elders of Blasket gave up. To Ireland’s Dail (Parliament) last week they sent pleading letters: “Take us off the islands; give us cottages on the mainland.” The Blaskets had decided to give back their six isles to the pixies, the pookas and the hobgoblins.

* The Blaskets got their name from the Gaelic word blascaod, which means, literally, “whale-backed island.”