Qualla: Blasket Islands

Blasket Islands: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Angr, CC BY 2.5. On a clear day from the cliffs of Dunquin, the Blasket Islands look like a school of whales drifting west - dark green humps against the silver Atlantic, the furthest of them so far out that lighthouse keepers were the last to leave it. Six principal islands sit off the western tip of the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry, and for centuries they held one of the most isolated Irish-speaking communities anywhere. When the last twenty-two people stepped off Great Blasket on a November day in 1953, they brought with them something rare and brittle: a way of life that had already, by then, been preserved on the page.

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Image: Angr | CC BY 2.5

Blasket Islands: The Sharp Reef of Rock

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ingo Mehling, CC BY-SA 3.0. Nobody is entirely sure what Blasket means. The most persuasive theory traces the name to the Old Norse brasker - sharp reef of rock, or dangerous place - a label any Viking would have understood after rounding these cliffs in foul weather. For a time the islands were called Ferr...

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Image: Ingo Mehling | CC BY-SA 3.0

Blasket Islands: An Island That Wrote Itself

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit M J Richardson, CC BY-SA 2.0. Something extraordinary happened on Great Blasket between the 1890s and the 1930s. Linguists and scholars - the Englishman Robin Flower, the classicist George Derwent Thomson, the Celticist Kenneth H. Jackson - climbed across the sound from Dunquin to study a community whose Iris...

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Image: M J Richardson | CC BY-SA 2.0

Blasket Islands: The Evacuation

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Morton from Adelaide, CC BY 2.0. By the early 1950s, the maths had become impossible. The young had left for America or for Dingle and Tralee, and those who remained could no longer keep a boat to the mainland in winter. Doctors could not always reach the sick. Both the islanders and the Irish government agreed ...

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Image: John Morton from Adelaide | CC BY 2.0

Blasket Islands: Haughey's Island

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. Twenty-one years after the evacuation, the most powerful politician in Ireland bought one of the smaller islands for himself. In 1974, Charles Haughey - then in political exile after the Arms Crisis - purchased Inishvickillane from the descendants of the O Dalaigh family. As Taoi...

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Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

Blasket Islands: Seabirds and Seals

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Osioni, CC BY-SA 3.0. What the islanders left behind, the wildlife inherited. The Blaskets are now one of Ireland's most important breeding sites for grey seals, who pup in the sea caves and haul out on the small shingle beaches in numbers that surprise visitors. At least thirteen species of seabird b...

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Image: Osioni | CC BY-SA 3.0