These, like many of Peig’s stories, often start in the middle or at the end. What came to mind when reading them wasn’t Irish literature now (except for Claire Keegan’s short stories, perhaps) but tales from other folklores, such as the Native American tradition.

The stories, too, are compelling, allthough, for me, this was less to do with their content (which was certainly interesting enough) than with the stark difference in their structure and composition, compared with those we’re most familiar with in the western tradition (and thus in Ireland) today. Or how, on New Year’s Eve, “The youngest son, or the man of the house, would take the loaf in his hands and go to the door, and strike the loaf against it three times : “Enter happiness, exit misfortune! We banish famine to / The Turks / - or to Englishmen -, / from tonight till a year from now and ever after.” There’s the belief in magical happenings and spiritual omens that one would expect, of course (my own nana was a firm believer in ghosts, fairies and banshees), but really it’s the little details in Peig’s accounts that draw the reader in, such as how an “Ulsterwoman” invariably meant a woman with supernatural powers, or how, at Christmas, the table was “scrubbed with sand from the beach and warm water” to be made “bright as a shilling”. In other words, sufficient time has now elapsed that the life in Ireland that Peig describes, and the mystical, Celtic-Christian mind that she herself evinces, appear strange enough to be genuinely captivating. A life, not that long ago, in which the cloth for clothing had to be spun yourself, in which tea (in Peig’s parents’ time), or sugar (during the war), was a rare luxury, and in which one prayed, regularly, that your husband, brother or son would make it back from fishing trips alive. An Ireland half-pagan, half-Christian, in which people like Peig rarely if ever left the place they were born, and in which the loss of children, to emigration or death, was a regular occurrence.

Both offer a painstakingly preserved record of an Ireland mostly lost now. Her first memoir, Peig, was introduced to the school curriculum in the 1960s, and was apparently so despised that her photograph was ripped from the book’s cover, stuck on classroom walls and used for target practice.īut don’t let that put you off. There’s a great deal of pleasantry and hardship in the life of a person who lives on an island like this that no one knows about except one who has lived here - going to bed at night with little food and rising again at the first chirp of the sparrow, then harrowing away at the world and maybe having no life worth talking about after doing our very best.Many Irish Times readers will have come across the Blasket Islands seanchaí Peig Sayers before - some, no doubt, against their will. “The most of my life I’ve spent on this lonely rock in the middle of the great sea. Other favourites: Anne Enright and Paula Meehan Peig Sayers spoke for generations of poor, uneducated Irish women who never had the opportunity to speak for themselves. Though much of what she described was unrelenting hardship, she was, by all accounts, pragmatic and cheerful in the face of it. Elegant prose it isn’t, but there are few authors with a more authentically Irish voice. It doesn’t matter to me that she didn’t place her own words down on paper, for this is only one element in the process of writing. I didn’t study Peig in school I was not scarred by its misery at a tender age, which surely puts me in a more objective position than most to argue that Sayers’ account of life on the Great Blasket Island remains relevant and significant. There are plenty of arguments against the inclusion of Sayers in the canon of great Irish women writers, foremost being the fact that she was illiterate in the language she spoke and instead dictated her famously bleak biography, as well as the hundreds of folk stories she contributed to the Irish Folklore Commission.

Peig sayers decendants