The last inhabitants of the Blasket Islands are evacuated - November 17th, 1953

On this day in 1953, the Irish government evacuated the last remaining residents of the Blasket Islands. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
Hello and welcome to This Day in History Class, a
show for those who can never know enough about history.
I'm Gay Bluesia and today we're looking back at a
bittersweet moment in Irish history, the sad but necessary evacuation

(00:23):
of the Blasket Islands. The day was November seventeenth, nineteen
fifty three. The Irish government evacuated the last remaining residents
of the Blasket Islands. The Rugged six Island Darkipelago lies

(00:46):
three miles off the west coast of Ireland's Dingle Peninsula.
It's the westernmost part of the country and some people
joke that the next Irish parish after the Blaskets is
the US Massachusetts, in particular. The largest of the islands,
the Great Blasket, was inhabited for centuries by a small,
close knit community of Irish fishermen and farmers. Some families

(01:10):
had lived on the island for generations. Others settled there
during the first half of the nineteenth century after being
evicted from their homes on the mainland. Many of them
found a better way of life on the island. They fished, farmed,
and hunted for their food and got on well with
their neighbors. That said, life on the rocky, wind swept

(01:31):
island was never easy. There were no stores, pubs, priests
or doctors, and getting to the nearest town required a
three mile boat ride and a five mile walk each way.
That was a long way to go for bread, flour,
or medicine, and since the weather didn't always cooperate, the
trip sometimes became longer and more perilous than expected. It

(01:54):
was probably a relief then in the early twentieth century
when scholars from across Europe took an inn in the
islanders and began making frequent trips to see them. Many
of the visitors came to study the unique language of
the Great Blasket, an especially pure form of Irish, uncorrupted
by the English spoken on much of the mainland. They

(02:15):
also tried to preserve that language for posterity by encouraging
the residents to record their own experiences in writing. Up
until that point, the Blasket community had relied only on
oral storytelling to pass down history and traditions, but thanks
to those visiting anthropologists, a few of the more literary
minded residents were convinced to put pen to paper. The

(02:38):
result was a rich and surprisingly extensive canon that includes
renowned autobiographical works such as The Island Man by Thomas o' crohne,
Twenty Years a Growing by Maurice O'Sullivan and Pague by
Pegue Sayers. Those lyrical accounts of daily life on the
island helped preserve the community's culture, memory, and language, and

(03:01):
they became all the more vital once it was time
for the islanders to bid their home farewell. The Great
Blasket's population peaked in nineteen sixteen at one hundred and
seventy six people. From that point on, the number steadily declined,
with most of the younger generation choosing to leave, either
to settle on the mainland or to head west to America.

(03:24):
By the nineteen forties, there were only a few dozen
Islanders left, most of whom were getting older and feeling
increasingly cut off from the rest of the world. It
was hard for some of them to walk up a hill,
much less make the trip to the mainland, and with
fewer people to farm and fish, food shortages became increasingly
common in the small village. Rising sea levels and extreme

(03:47):
weather patterns presented their own challenges. The Great Blasket is
only about three miles long and a half mile wide.
It has very few trees and structures, and the highest
point on the island is less more than one thousand
feet above sea level. High winds and waves posed a
serious threat to residents on the lower part of the island,

(04:07):
especially since they were completely cut off from emergency services.
By the late nineteen forties, conditions had grown so dire
that some of the islanders started to petition the government
for help. It took a few years to work out
the logistics, but in nineteen fifty three the Tatia, or
Prime Minister of Ireland, finally ordered an island wide evacuation.

(04:31):
There were only twenty two residents left by that point,
and while they were sad to leave their homes, most
agreed there was no future for them on the island.
With that grim realization in mind, the Blasket Islanders gathered
on the shore on November seventeenth, nineteen fifty three, with
all of their furniture and belongings. They waited there for

(04:52):
an officer of the Irish Land Commission to arrive, at
which point they were ferried over the sound and taken
to four newly built cottag in the nearby village of Duncan.
Living on the mainland was a difficult adjustment for all
of them, but the younger generation had an easier time
than the older islanders. Some families cross the Atlantic to

(05:13):
the US, while others stayed put on the Dingle Peninsula
in sight of their former home. Those who did later
helped establish the Blaskets Center, a museum in County Kerry
that celebrates the legacy of the islanders, including their many
literary achievements. So even though the island has been uninhabited
for the past seventy years, the story of those who

(05:35):
once called it home lives on. I'm Gabe Lucier and
hopefully you now know a little more about history today
than you did yesterday. You can learn even more about
history by following us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at
pdi HC Show, and if you have any comments or suggestions,

(05:58):
you can always pass them by writing to this day
at iHeartMedia dot com. Thanks to Chandler Mays for producing
the show, and thank you for listening. I'll see you
back here again soon for another Day in History Class.