Qualla: Inishkea Islands

Inishkea Islands: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On the afternoon of 28 October 1927, the weather off the Mullet Peninsula was unusually fine. The Inishkea fishermen launched their currachs as they had for generations, working the herring grounds west of the islands. By evening, a sudden gale was tearing across the western seaboard. Forty-five lives were lost at sea that night up and down the Irish coast. Ten of them were Inishkea men, including a fourteen-year-old boy named Terry Reilly and his father. The community on these two small islands, which had hung on through famine and emigration and centuries of isolation, would not survive the loss. Within seven years the last residents had crossed to the mainland for good.

Read more: Inishkea Islands on Qualla

Inishkea Islands: Six Thousand Years of People

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

Read more: Inishkea Islands on Qualla

Inishkea Islands: The Godstone of Inishkea

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

Read more: Inishkea Islands on Qualla

Inishkea Islands: Whaling on Rusheen

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 furt...

Read more: Inishkea Islands on Qualla

Inishkea Islands: Famine, Piracy, and Survival

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 f...

Read more: Inishkea Islands on Qualla

Inishkea Islands: After the Storm

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

Read more: Inishkea Islands on Qualla