Perseverance, Resistance, and Community: An Introduction to the History, Heritage, and Archaeology of Great Blasket, County Kerry, Ireland

Though less Than Three kilomeTers from the mainland, at times the distance could have been three thousand, as the sound separating Great Blasket Island from Dunquin in County Kerry has always been a treacherous passageway that has claimed countless lives. Why would anyone want to live on an island that had limited land for farming, no church, no infrastructure, and no public house? Why, on the most westerly frontier of Europe, would anyone want to call this island home? There are no simple answers to these questions, which are intertwined with the social structures of society and the realities of everyday practice. To answer these questions, we must contextualize the history of the Blaskets and its people. In this article, I provide a brief history of the island. I am most interested in periods of strife there, particularly during the Great Famine (1845–52) and the decades leading up to the evacuation of Great Blasket in 1953. During the Famine, Ireland, as well as the Blaskets, experienced rapid population decline. But though I am curious about why people left, I am more interested in why people stayed. Through this work I seek to answer the underlying questions about why, despite numerous hardships, the Islanders decide to live on the Blaskets, and what led to the evacuation and subsequent demise of the community. Embedded in this evolving way of life is the juxtaposition of economic class, gender, and modernity.