Blasket Islands

Um, it was up at the top of this, um, this, this hill bas- basically, and there's a, there's a little, there's an old like lookout shack there.

It was a beautiful, beautiful day, um, in amongst like some fairly, what had been some fairly not great weather, and suddenly it was this gorgeous sunny day and sitting at the top of this hill looking out west over the Blasket Islands, you know, to the horizon and thinking, "God, I made it.

This..." You know what I mean? It's just the, the final lap now, you know-

Yeah

But, uh, it was so cool.

Um, it was up at the top of this, um, this, this hill bas- basically, and there's a, there's a little, there's an old like lookout shack there.

It was a beautiful, beautiful day, um, in amongst like some fairly, what had been some fairly not great weather, and suddenly it was this gorgeous sunny day and sitting at the top of this hill looking out west over the Blasket Islands, you know, to the horizon and thinking, "God, I made it.

This..." You know what I mean? It's just the, the final lap now, you know-

Oliver Callanan on RTE Radio One.

Aisling Costello from Kilkenny and Conor Jones from Wexford have just spent the last six months working on one of the most remote places in the country, the Great Blasket Island on Blasket Mor.

The couple beat hundreds of others to be chosen as caretakers of the island, and they're now preparing to leave because their stay is just about coming to an end.

Aisling and Connor are on the line from the Blaskets.

So I've done a lot of writing and reading and singing about all things related to the sea, obviously, because my family have been here for generations.

Yeah, I wrote a song about my great grandfather who was from the Blaskets and he drowned up in Kosovo.

They wrote a song about him.

And

Rest went well.

And then once we hit sort of Dingle and the Blaskets there and the Skellig's, you know, things took a turn for the worse.

The weather took a turn for the worse and really from there on.

And it was very challenging.

But Jesus, that was hairy.

And then, you know, heading over Spiddle, Cairns Spidale, is that what they call it? Or Seville, north of the Blaskets.

If I didn't fall out there that day, I'll never fall out of a kayak.

And what goes through your mind when you're there?

So, no, I actually quite admire, very much admire, Meg Sayers and the fact that she managed to Something like 300 or maybe more stories in her head, which she could, and of course, there were many storytellers like her, but certainly she was iconic in that sense.

And the isolation of the Blasket Island as well, and the certain amount of tragedy in her own life.

And just found it very, very interesting.

And of course, I'm not a fluent Irish speaker, but I love Irish.

I can't overemphasise what a stern-looking character he was.

And his idea of leisure was to go on walking tours of places like the Blasket Islands, reading the original texts that came out of those places.

There was one more thing about Mr Brooks, something that matters a lot to this story.

At Mount Temple, music was compulsory for every first year, for every child.

I mean it's a mad way to even be talking isn't it we'll all just

we'll all just move to the Blasket Islands right and we'll just but the Blasket Islands has really good 5G this is the problem like so it's like get away from it all amazingly good 5G like better than where I live in Galway

yeah It's like, I don't know.

What's the moral of the story?