Qualla: Inishvickillane

Inishvickillane: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ridiculopathy, CC0. There is an island in the Blaskets that the islanders called simply The Inis - The Island - as if the others did not need a name. Inishvickillane is the second-westernmost lump of land in the archipelago, more or less the last green hectare before the Atlantic empties for two thousand miles. Some called it the last parish before America. Then, in 1974, an Irish politician in disgrace bought it for cash and turned it into a private retreat where the President of France would later sip whiskey, a herd of red deer would learn to graze on Atlantic salt grass, and the Irish Naval Service would draw up contingency plans for extracting a Taoiseach by helicopter.

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Inishvickillane: The Inis

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ridiculopathy, CC0. Inishvickillane - or Inishvickillaun, depending on the spelling - takes its name from the Irish Inis Mhic Uileain, meaning the island of the son of Killane, or Mac Killane's island. The Blasket islanders themselves rarely used the full name. They called it The Inis. It was the cl...

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Inishvickillane: The Stone with the Prayer

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ridiculopathy, CC0. Before the politicians, before the deer, before the helicopters, there were monks. At the south-east end of the island lie the remains of an early monastic settlement: the foundations of a dry-stone oratory, a small graveyard, a leacht with a stone cross, a possible beehive hut, ...

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Inishvickillane: Charles Haughey Buys an Island

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ridiculopathy, CC0. In 1974, Charles J. Haughey - a former Irish senior government minister who had been sacked over the Arms Crisis and was lingering on the backbenches of Fianna Fail - bought Inishvickillane from the descendants of the O Dalaigh family of Dunquin, who had pulled up their roots abo...

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Inishvickillane: A President and a Helicopter Plan

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ridiculopathy, CC0. Haughey would go on to serve three times as Taoiseach between 1979 and 1992, and across those years Inishvickillane functioned as a working retreat. He hosted prominent visitors including French President Francois Mitterrand. He commissioned a small private chapel. He stocked the...

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Inishvickillane: Birds, Deer, and the West Wind

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ridiculopathy, CC0. Politics aside, Inishvickillane is a serious natural site. It holds important breeding colonies of northern fulmars, European storm-petrels, and Atlantic puffins, the same species that animate the rest of the archipelago. The introduced red deer - controversial when Haughey broug...

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