Archaeological evidence indicates that the Inishkea Islands have been occupied since at least the Neolithic period - circa 3500 to 2000 BC. On Inishkea North, megalithic tomb ruins still lie along the northeast coast, and three burial mounds locally called the Baileys (Bailey Mor, Bailey Beag, Bailey Doite) hold their shape against the wind. By the sixth century AD, Christian monks had built beehive huts and a small church dedicated to St Colmcille on the southwest of Inishkea North. The archaeologist Francoise Henry excavated here in the 1930s and 1940s, uncovering cross-slabs dating to the late seventh and eighth centuries, and evidence of a workshop that produced purple dye from dog whelk shells - probably for manuscript illumination. The islands are named, tradition holds, for Saint Kea, a hermit who lived here in those early Christian centuries.

Into the nineteenth century, the islanders kept a religious practice that other parts of Ireland had long abandoned: the worship of a small stone idol called the Naomhog - or, in the local pronunciation Robert Jocelyn wrote down in 1851, the Neevougi. The stone resembled a thick roll of homespun flannel because it was ceremonially re-clothed in new flannel whenever its aid was sought, a duty overseen by an elderly woman described as its priestess. Tradition credited the Godstone with calming storms, hastening potato growth, healing the sick, and protecting currachs at sea. It was carried on voyages for safe passage. North and South Inishkea reportedly stole it from each other to improve their harvests. By the early twentieth century the Godstone had vanished - either, as one account holds, thrown into the sea by Fr O'Reilly in the 1890s, or, as others maintain, hidden away by islanders who would not give it up.

Between 1908 and 1914, a Norwegian whaling station operated on Rusheen Island, a tidal islet just off Inishkea South. Norway had imposed a temporary ban on whaling in its own waters, and the Inishkea operation was part of a broader push by Norwegian whalers to exploit waters further afield. For a few years, dead whales were dragged ashore and processed for oil and bone meal within sight of the island's small church ruins. The station closed when the First World War made operations impractical. Today its concrete and brick foundations still mark the islet.

The Mullet region was hit hard by the Great Famine of the 1840s, but the Inishkea population actually rose during those years - in part, oral tradition holds, through coastal piracy. Islanders in currachs would intercept cargo vessels off the coast, sometimes throwing stones to force crews below deck, and seize sacks of flour and meal. Coordinated raids ranged across Broadhaven and Blacksod Bay, exploiting the islanders' knowledge of local currents and hidden coves. This was not profit-driven piracy; it was the desperate improvisation of a community that was hungry. Coastguard patrols gradually curtailed the raids, but the stories survived in local folklore as a testament to the kind of resilience the famine forced on those it did not kill.

The 1927 drowning broke something on the islands that could not be repaired. The community had numbered more than three hundred at the turn of the century, all monolingual Irish speakers, living in stone cottages on land they had worked for generations. After the storm, families began to leave for the mainland; by the mid-1930s the islands were effectively abandoned. Today two people are listed as living year-round on Inishkea, with the seasonal population rising to about fifteen between May and September. The cottages are roofless. Stone walls still divide what were once potato beds. Barnacle geese - the birds the islands are named for in some accounts - winter on the machair, and peregrine falcons hunt above the deserted villages. The Godstone has never been found.