Great Blasket Island

This has happened primarily since the 1960s, and all this investment in tourism in the region has also brought with it new infrastructure like roads and airports.

One interesting story about the area, off the coast of County Kerry is the Great Blasket Island.

There are a number of islands out there, but I wanna talk about this one in particular.

It's basically a very rocky, sheer island with cliffs.

And realizing that the isolation had become too much, the islanders wanted to be moved to the mainland.

The government obliged and relocated them to brand-new cottages on the mainland on the tip of the Dingle Peninsula.

Today, the Great Blasket Island is completely uninhabited, but during the summer you can take a passenger ferry from the peninsula to walk out there among the, uh, the ruins of the village.

In any event, I thought that was an interesting story about both the depopulation in certain parts of the area and the preservation of Irish culture and language.

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 he learned Irish, he learned fluent Irish, and he got a nickname, Blá Hín, Little Flower.

And he was very friendly with Tomás O'Clihan, the great Blasket author, and he learned his Irish from him.

And he also translated that book into English, The Island Man.

And he played a huge role, really, in the island.

But all through this book, there's an amazing sense of, I suppose, first of all, his own affection for the people he was with and amazing descriptions.

Descriptions of people, descriptions of peg-sayers, depictions of, you know, going to Innisfail and fishing and hunting for rabbits.

In the English language at that time, apart from the books that were authored by Mícheál Súlaibháin and Tomás O'Brien and Peg Sayers themselves, in the English language, this was the key to people knowing about the Great Blaskett, knowing something of the story, and added very much to the fame of the island over the years.

It's kind of set it apart from other places.

and interactions I would have had at some stage in my life and what I learned from those.

And there was one particular day we were in on the Great Blasket Island off South West Kerry, off West Kerry.

And there's Throg Vaughan, it's the big white beach.

And in the wintertime, it's covered with seals, grey seals.