The Last People to Leave the Great Blasket Island

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On the morning of 17 November 1953, twenty-two people left their homes for the last time. They walked down to the pier, loaded their belongings onto a boat, and crossed the narrow channel to the mainland. Several of them wept. The Great Blasket Island — once home to a thriving Irish-speaking community — was abandoned that day, and it has never been permanently inhabited since.

This is the story of a place, a people, and a way of life that disappeared in a single morning.

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Where Is the Great Blasket Island?

The Great Blasket (An Blascaod Mór in Irish) is the largest of the Blasket Islands, a small archipelago sitting off the tip of the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry. From the mainland village of Dunquin, the island is visible on most days — a long, dark shape rising from the Atlantic just three kilometres offshore.

The island stretches about six kilometres in length and rises to 346 metres at its highest point. It has no harbour to speak of, just a small landing slip on the eastern side that faces the mainland. In rough weather — which was most of the year — boats could not get in or out. The community was, in every practical sense, cut off from the world.

Life on the Blasket

At its peak in the mid-nineteenth century, the Great Blasket was home to around 150 people. They lived in a row of stone cottages along the southern slope of the island, facing the channel towards the mainland. There was no electricity, no running water, no doctor, no priest. A schoolteacher visited when weather allowed.

They farmed small plots of land, kept cattle and sheep, fished for mackerel and lobster, and harvested the sea. Everything that could not be grown or caught had to come by boat from Dingle — flour, tobacco, timber, medicine. When the weather closed in, those supplies stopped.

The language of the island was Irish — specifically a dialect of Munster Irish that linguists have studied extensively. The islanders had no English until they went to school. Even then, Irish was the language of everyday life: for fishing, for storytelling, for argument, for prayer.

Their social life centred on the kitchen hearth. Neighbours would gather in the evenings to tell stories, sing, and talk — a tradition known as the céilí. The island had a rich oral culture stretching back generations, and it produced some of the most significant Irish-language writing of the twentieth century.

A Community Under Pressure

By the early twentieth century, the population had already begun to fall. Young men and women left for the mainland and, increasingly, for America. The island had a significant connection to Springfield, Massachusetts, where many former islanders and their descendants settled. The pattern was familiar: the young left, the old stayed, and the community slowly shrank.

The First World War interrupted emigration temporarily, but the flow resumed afterwards. By 1947, the population had fallen to around 50. By 1953, just 22 people remained, and many of them were elderly.

The practical problems were severe. The landing slip was dangerous. Boats were lost. In 1947, a young man named Seán Ó Cearna died of meningitis after storms prevented him being taken to the mainland for medical treatment. His death became a symbol of the island’s impossible situation. The people could not get help when they needed it most.

The islanders wrote to the Irish government asking to be moved to the mainland, where their children could go to school, where doctors could reach them, where they could be connected to the rest of the country. For years, the government was slow to act.

The Day They Left

The evacuation came on 17 November 1953. Twenty-two people — the last permanent residents of the Great Blasket — crossed to the mainland. They brought their furniture, their livestock, and what they could carry of their lives.

The Irish state resettled most of them in new houses in Dunquin and the surrounding townlands on the mainland. A few went further afield. Some never fully adjusted to life on the mainland. The island, for all its hardship, had been home.

The cats were left behind. The cattle were taken across by boat, but the cats — dozens of them — remained on the island. They went feral. For years afterwards, they were visible to anyone who crossed over, living wild on an island that no longer had people.

The Literary Legacy

What makes the Great Blasket different from thousands of other small, depopulated Irish islands is its literature. In the early twentieth century, a series of island writers — encouraged by visiting scholars — wrote down their lives. The result is a small body of work now considered among the finest prose ever written in the Irish language.

Tomás Ó Criomhthain wrote An tOileánach (The Islandman), published in 1929. It describes island life in plain, exact language, and ends with a line that became famous: “Our likes will not be there again.”

Muiris Ó Súilleabháin wrote Fiche Blian ag Fás (Twenty Years A-Growing), published in 1933. E.M. Forster wrote the introduction to the English edition and called it “something unique and beautiful.” It describes growing up on the island in the early twentieth century — the fishing, the swimming, the storytelling, the emigration.

Peig Sayers, perhaps the best-known of the Blasket writers, dictated her autobiography Peig to her son. Published in 1936, it became required reading in Irish schools for decades and remains a landmark of the language.

These three works, written by people who had little formal education and had never thought of themselves as writers, became part of the canon of Irish literature.

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Visiting the Great Blasket Today

The Great Blasket is now a National Historic Park. It is uninhabited except for a small café and hostel that operate in summer. Visitors can walk the island, explore the ruins of the village, and look out over the same Atlantic that the islanders watched for centuries.

Ferries run from Dunquin from April to September, weather permitting. The crossing takes around fifteen minutes, but it depends entirely on sea conditions — the same conditions that defined island life. Boats are cancelled regularly. If you want to visit, build flexibility into your plans. Do not plan it as your only activity on a single day.

On the island, the village ruins are open to walk through. The stone cottages are roofless now, the walls slowly being reclaimed by grass and sea wind. You can look into the spaces where families lived, where the céilí gatherings happened, where Tomás Ó Criomhthain wrote by firelight.

There are no tourist facilities beyond the small café. Bring food and water if you plan to spend the day. The walking on the island is rough in places — sturdy footwear is advisable.

The Blasket Centre at Dunquin

If you cannot get to the island — or if you want context before you go — the Blasket Centre (Ionad an Bhlascaoid Mhóir) at Dunquin is essential. It sits on the clifftop overlooking the island and channel, with one of the finest views in Ireland.

The centre covers the history and literature of the island in depth. It has exhibitions on the three major writers, on the daily life of the community, on the archaeology of the Blaskets, and on the emigration to Springfield, Massachusetts. There is a good bookshop with English translations of the island literature.

The centre is open daily from March to early November. Admission is charged. Allow two hours if you want to take it in properly.

Dunquin itself is at the far end of the Dingle Peninsula, about 60 kilometres from Tralee. The road along the peninsula is narrow and scenic. In high summer it gets busy, particularly around Slea Head. If you have time, combine a visit to the Blasket Centre with a drive around the Slea Head loop.

What the Island Leaves Behind

The Great Blasket was not a romantic place. It was a real community that lived under difficult conditions, that struggled, that produced remarkable work, and that eventually ran out of people. The last twenty-two left weeping not because they wanted to stay, but because something was ending that they knew could not be replaced.

That gap between what was and what remains is what people go to see. The ruined cottages, the silence, the Atlantic at every horizon. The island is not frozen in time — it is simply empty. What was there once is gone.

But the books survive. The manuscripts are in archives. The language, despite everything, is still spoken on the mainland around Dunquin and across the Dingle Peninsula.

For anyone interested in Irish culture and history, the Great Blasket is not an optional stop. It is one of the places where you can understand what Ireland was, what it lost, and what it managed to keep.

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Photo: Shutterstock

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