Over the last two days the people on the island of Inishmaan have had no water supply.
It got me to thinking of my island neighbours.
I remember my first memories of going to visit relatives on Achill here in Mayo.
My grandmother’s elder sister told me that I had island men in my blood.
I might have been five. I recall looking down at my arm and trying to visualise them.
“How did they get in there?” I asked her.
It was the sort of information that a child can only process as a child, but only as an adult do you think more of it.
Achill never seemed to me to be an island. It is separated from the mainland by a very short stretch of water. So short that a causeway was built in the 1940s. My father and his brother took the family lorry, one of the few “tipper trucks” in the county at the time down to Connemara and loaded up with the huge rocks that they had too many of in Galway.
Seeing such a splash in Achill sound would have been great fun for me the four year old. However it took place many years before I saw the light of day.
Being an islander, I suppose, is being aware you are on an island.
The English are often fond of saying they are “an island race”, but the Scots have never seemed to have that awareness. Perhaps it is because of the size of the island of Britain.
Then again the island of Cuba is even larger and the people of that island definitely are aware that they’re surrounded by water-and US warships.
I recently spent some time on Clare Island in Clewe Bay.
We hiked the entire place and finally “bivvied” at the signal tower on the western edge of the island.
The following morning the morning sun came up and I finally got what it was to worship the sun.
Perhaps being on an island just connects you?
Just plugs you into something bigger by being on something smaller.
You can be cut off, weather matters.
Perhaps islanders are ahead of the game in knowing the meaning of climate change.
Yet there is a friction. Having a completely modern life style on an offshore island is unsustainable without huge subsidies.
Life without that taxpayer input would be to impose a pre-modern austerity on islanders.
I was reminded of a brilliant play I saw in Westport a few months ago performed by the St.Patrick’s drama group.
They staged Martin McDonagh’s “The Cripple of Inishmaan” which is set on that island in 1934.
Martin, born in London of Connemara gailgeoiri parents he has the 2nd generation suil eile on the land of his parents.
The Irish islander was an icon of De Valera’s austere, inward looking nationalism. They were the epitome of the self-sufficient Gaelic Ireland he wanted for the entire island of Ireland. The islanders were so self sufficiently contented that they craved the boat to America.
McDonagh’s play is based at the time of the making of the film “Man of Aran.”
The reality of island life in the 1930s portrayed in the play is much more squalid, backward and suffocating.
An old neighbour of mine years ago in Donegal was an island man.
He could have taught “Dev” a thing or two about nationalism. I asked him how his people got onto Inisherr in the first place?
He told me that, in the old days, these little islands were the only places in Ireland that the “mere Irish” could live without a landlord. The life was so unforgiving that the islands weren’t worth owning by a British landlord.
If the mythology of the island folk is one of tough resilience relying only on their neighbours and having no need of outsiders then today it is very very different.
These days the denizens of Ireland’s offshore islands have state of the art harbours, regular ferry services and air ambulances.
The cost of maintaining these small populations is huge to the Irish taxpayer.
They are probably the most subsidised people in the EU.
I feel mean with myself for even thinking of these communities in terms of cost.
Oul Nora would scold me if she were here and she could read these English words.
She was right I do have island men in my blood.
I shouldn’t forget that.
Is oileánach mé.
