Hungry for Home: Leaving the Blaskets : a Journey from the Edge of Ireland Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

Hungry for Home: Leaving the Blaskets : a Journey from the Edge of Ireland Book

The Great Irish diaspora that began in the 1840s with the potato famine soon saw the island's population of 8 million reduced to less than 4 million. The process continued well into the 20th century, and has only finally been reversed with the arrival of tourism in the West of Ireland. In Hungry for Home, Cole Moreton traces one of the last of those tragic emigration stories, from one of the very remotest places in the West: Great Blasket, off the Dingle peninsula in County Kerry. The last chapter in the ancient history of the Blaskets began on Christmas Eve 1946, when a young man on the island, Seainin ("little Sean"), collapsed in bed with a terrible headache. There was no doctor, no policeman, not even a priest on the island to help. The only telephone was down. And on Christmas Day, Seainin died, "with his aunt whispering the Act of Contrition into a dead ear." And with that, the islanders realized that their lives on Blasket were no longer tenable. It is the kind of story that has been told before, and by natives of the islands as well, in their unique, poetic style: in Peig Sayers's memoirs, for instance, or Maurice O'Sullivan's Twenty Years A-Growing. But Morton's account is equally worth reading, imaginative and sensitively written, as it follows the O Cearna family all the way from Blasket to the mainland, and eventually to America, the New World. It is pleasing, too, that the author does not pretend to some mythical Irish ancestry of his own, as is so fashionable nowadays with politicians and creatives on both sides of the Atlantic. Instead, he states clearly that he is neither American nor Irish, but comes from East London. Good for him. --Christopher Hart, Amazon.co.uk Read More

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  • Product Description

    On Christmas Eve, 1946, a young man collapsed on a remote island off the western coast of Ireland. There was no priest or doctor on the Great Blasket and no contact with the outside world. Helpless, his family watched him die. This was the catalyst for the end of the island community whose people spoke a pure form of Irish and gathered by turf fires to hear tales handed down from ancient times. Despair forced them to abandon their medieval way of life and plead for evacuation, which finally came in 1953. Some, like the dead man's sister went to live on the Irish mainland. Others headed west to America.

    Cole Moreton's Hungry for Home tells the story of these islands and the dramatic events that led to their abandonment. He goes in search of the islanders, discovering a few survivors still living within sight of the Great Blasket. Following the footsteps of the emigrants who had left half a century earlier, Moreton seeks out the dead man's brothers and discovers an extraordinary end to their story. Driven out of a home locked in the Dark Ages, they had crossed the Atlantic and made a new life in the world's most advanced nation. This is a book about home and what that means and a gripping account of the quest for a vanished people, and the story of the Kearney family's breathtaking journey from one way of life to another.

  • 0670892076
  • 9780670892075
  • Cole Moreton
  • 27 July 2000
  • Penguin Books Australia
  • Hardcover (Book)
  • 288
  • 1st American Ed
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