Peter CostelloThe Loneliest Boy in the World: The Last Child of the Great Blasket Island by Gearóid Cheaist Ó Catháin, with Patricia Ahearn (The Collins Press, €12.99 / £10.50)
This is a remarkable book, the last piece perhaps in the series of books which have come to be called ‘the Blasket Library’. The titles are all familiar: The Islandman, My Own Story and Twenty Years A-growing. It would be too much to expect that this book would also be a masterpiece. It is not, but nevertheless anyone whose imagination has been caught by the old life on the Blaskets will read this account with great interest, and be grateful to Patricia Ahearn for coaxing his life story out of Gearóid Ó Catháin.
The book falls into two parts, his life on the island before the evacuation, and the later life he and the others islanders lived after their removal to the mainland.
Little Gearóid was fated to be the last child brought up on the Great Blasket. A whole generation, some 30 years, separated him from the next youngest, an uncle. Strictly speaking he was not born on the island, but in the Dingle hospital, in July 1947. On his return to the island he was toasted by the community, yet “there was no other child in sight as a playmate for me or a school to educate me”. What he recalls rounds out in a way what we learn from the earlier books.
He left the island in 1953, so into those few years he compressed the experience of an ancient way of life that was fast altering under the pressures of the outside world. The interest of the outside media in his situation brought strange results, sheaves of letters from all parts of the world from people aroused by the lonely plight of “Gerard Keane”.
A photograph shows him wearing a gansey and a school cap much like any other child of the day. But the life he actually led, a mixture of Davy Crocket tales and traditional music, was far from that.
Aftermath
However, the second part tells the story that needed to be told too, the way the world dealt with those whom the government finally removed. The immediate aftermath is full of interest, especially in relation to government treatment of the people. The book continues with the story of the author’s own marriage and family life before rounding out with some thoughts on the legacy of the old island life.
One thing that strikes me, thinking about the life of the island. Ó Catháin observes that the islands had been inhabited for some 300 years in modern times – though of course there is evidence of the much earlier occupations of various western islands by anchorites.
However, there was no school until 1860, no nurse, no policeman. Nor was there a priest. In Gearóid’s day Fr Tom Moriarty of Ballyferriter came only once a year.
So here was a Christian, a pious Catholic community that remained religious without the benefit of clergy. This may seem a deprivation, but there is perhaps a lesson to be learnt here for our own future, when many mainland communities may well find themselves also without a priest. It is a reminder that religion depends on individuals, and not always on structures, on faith rather than hierarchy.