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

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.