The tough realities of Irish island life are depicted in a new memoir of the Connemara island of Inis Treabhair.
The last years of an Irish-speaking community are recorded by Micheál Ó Conghaile in his book, An Island Christmas. The island’s last inhabitant, Pádraig Ó Loideáin, left the island in 2010.
A review by Micheál Ó hAodha in The Sunday Independent describes the book as “a small gem of a memoir incorporating place, people and childhood recollection”.
It includes stunning black and white photographs by Joe O’Shaughnessy of Patsy Lydon bringing his Christmas tree and bicycle in a currach to his Inis Treabhair home in December 1991.
“Daily tasks and harsh realities that people often took for granted on the mainland but which involved a great deal more work and struggle are given a special magic in Ó Conghaile’s prose as he brings tender memories to life in this unique and fascinating memoir,” Ó hAodha writes.
Patsy Lydon at home at Christmas on the Connemara island of Inis Treabhair Photo: Joe O’Shaughnessy
“Ó Conghaile doesn’t shirk from describing the back-breaking work the island community, both adults and children, performed – turf-cutting on the mainland and the subsequent loading into boats, the slaughtering of fowl and pigs for food ensure the maintenance of a way of life that survived for many centuries,” he writes.
“You needed to be hardy and tough to survive on an island, and that’s the truth. And yet this is no rose-tinted or nostalgic look at the past, even if a certain loneliness permeates the story for what we all may have lost with the arrival of the technology-saturated modernity that defines urban Ireland today,” he notes.
An Island Christmas’ (Nollaig Oileánach) is available from mercierpress.ie and all good bookshops nationwide.
Read The Sunday Independent here
