Great Blasket Island (An Blascaod Mór) lies about 5km (3 miles) by boat from Dunquin in Co. Kerry. Its Irish-speaking community was officially evacuated on 17 November 1953, after decades of emigration and a winter death that no doctor could reach. Just over 20 people were left. Today the island is mostly State-owned, and you can visit by ferry, usually from April to September or October, weather permitting.
On 17 November 1953, the last community on the Great Blasket left for the mainland. There were just over 20 of them, most of them men. Across the water in Dunquin, new houses were waiting.
In 1911, about 160 people had lived on the island. It also produced some of the best-known books in Irish. Then emigration, storms and one terrible winter brought it to an end.
Here’s why, plus the island’s writers and how to visit today.
The last days: November 1953
The Blasket Centre, run by the Office of Public Works (OPW), gives 17 November 1953 as the official evacuation date. The islanders had been asking the government to move them since 1947. This was not a forced clearance.
Most accounts, including the Irish Times and IrishCentral, say 22 people were left. The Blasket Centre counts 21 on the day: four elderly women and 17 men. Either way, it was a village of old people and bachelors.
A house and a few acres in Dunquin
The government of the day was Éamon de Valera’s Fianna Fáil government. He was Taoiseach (Ireland’s prime minister) from 1951 to 1954. According to IrishCentral, the Irish Land Commission handled the move.
Each family got a house and a few acres in Dunquin, facing the island across the sound. Some accounts say one family, the Ó Súilleabháins, stayed on into 1954. That is why you’ll sometimes see 1954 given as the end.
The last child of the Blaskets
Then there’s Gearóid Ó Catháin. He was born in 1947 and grew up as the island’s only child. In April 1951, the Irish Press ran a feature on the “lonely child”, the Irish Times recalled in 1999.
Newspapers around the world picked up his story. Some readers even offered to adopt him. His family were the first to leave, in September 1953, when he was six. He told the Irish Times he remembered it clearly.
The death that changed everything
If one event pushed the islanders to ask for help, it was the death of Seán (Seáinín) Ó Cearnaigh in January 1947. The family name was Carney in English.
His brother, Mike Carney, told the story to the Irish Times in 2013. Seán was 24 and had meningitis. The weather was so bad that no doctor could reach the island. The phone the government had supplied had not worked for a week.
Three men set out in a naomhóg (say nay-VOHG), the light canvas-covered currach of West Kerry, to fetch a coffin. They could not get back through the seas. Seán’s body lay on his father’s bed for three days.
Mike recalled his father telling officials to record that “the government killed him”. Mike wrote to de Valera, and came to believe evacuation was the only answer. De Valera visited the Blaskets himself in July 1947, according to a UCD archive blog.
Why was Great Blasket Island evacuated? Emigration, women and fishing
Seán’s death was the final blow, but the island had been emptying for decades. The census figures show how fast it went.
- 1911: 160 people, the census peak
- 1926: 143
- 1936: 110
- 1946: 45
- 1951: 27
- 1956: nobody
My short video tells the story of the evacuation in under a minute.
The young went to Springfield, Massachusetts
The biggest cause was emigration. According to the Blasket Centre, most islanders who left went to Springfield, Massachusetts, many to the Hungry Hill area. Some settled in nearby Holyoke and Hartford.
Older brothers and sisters sent the fare home, one by one, and West Kerry Irish could be heard on the streets of Springfield. Our piece on the Irish diaspora in America covers the bigger picture.
Women left first
The Blasket Centre says women made up 45% of islanders in 1911, but only about 29% by 1946. Fewer women meant fewer marriages and fewer children.
The fishing collapsed
When steam trawlers arrived, the small boats could not compete. The Blasket Centre records 400 canoes west of Dingle in 1921 and only 80 by 1934.
Where are the Blasket Islands?
The Blasket Islands (Na Blascaodaí, roughly “nuh BLAS-kay-dee”) lie off the western tip of the Dingle Peninsula. The Great Blasket, An Blascaod Mór (“un BLAS-kayd MORE”), is the biggest, and the only one whose village lasted into the 1950s.
According to the Blasket Centre, it is 5.2km (3.2 miles) long and about 1km (0.6 miles) at its widest. The village sits at the eastern end, above An Trá Bhán, the White Strand.
By boat it is about 5km (3 miles) from the pier at Dunquin (Dún Chaoin, said “doon KHEEN”). As the popular saying goes, the next parish is America.
The other islands
Besides the Great Blasket, the main islands are Beiginis, Inis na Bró, Inis Tuaisceart, Inis Mhic Uibhleáin and An Tiaracht (Tearaght).
The Blasket Centre says Inis Mhic Uibhleáin (Inishvickillane) was home to the Daly family until 1904. It later became the summer home of Charles Haughey, a former Taoiseach.
Island life before the end
In his 1756 history of Co. Kerry, Dr Charles Smith described the “great island” as having five or six families. He also passed on a claim that nobody had died there in 45 years. That tells you more about Smith’s sources than the island’s health.
The islanders lived by fishing and farming, and they lived through Irish. From the late 1800s they fished for lobster, mackerel and pollock from the naomhóg. On roughly 1,000 acres (about 400 hectares) of mostly rough grazing, they grew oats and potatoes and kept sheep and a few cows.
Moving a cow to the mainland meant tying it up and laying it in the bottom of a naomhóg. I’d have liked to see the cow’s face. Fuel was heather and thin turf, which is peat dug and dried for burning.
The Blasket writers
Visiting scholars came to learn the island’s Irish, and they encouraged the islanders to write. J.M. Synge visited in 1905. Carl Marstrander from Norway came in 1907, and the English scholar Robin Flower in 1910.
The islanders nicknamed Flower “Bláithín”, little flower. He died in 1946, and his ashes were scattered on An Dún, a hilltop on the island.
Tomás Ó Criomhthain: An tOileánach (The Islandman)
Tomás Ó Criomhthain (1855 to 1937) was a farmer and fisherman. Brian Ó Ceallaigh, who came to the island in 1917, gave him Loti and Gorky to read, and later his own fountain pen.
An tOileánach (say “un TIL-awn-okh”), meaning The Islander, came out in 1929. Robin Flower’s English translation, The Islandman, followed in 1934. A full translation by Garry Bannister and David Sowby, The Islander, came in 2012.
It ends with one of the most quoted lines in Irish: “mar ná beidh ár leithéidí arís ann”. Flower translated it as “the like of us will never be again”. Tomás was right. Twenty-four years after the book came out, the island was empty.
Peig Sayers: Peig
Peig Sayers (1873 to 1958) was born in Dunquin and married Pádraig Ó Guithín of the Great Blasket in 1892. She had been schooled in English and could not write Irish. So she dictated her life story, Peig (1936), to her son Mícheál.
Bryan MacMahon translated Peig into English in 1974. Her Machnamh Seanmhná (1939) became An Old Woman’s Reflections.
She was a seanchaí (said “SHAN-a-khee”), a traditional storyteller. Robin Flower, Kenneth Jackson and Seosamh Ó Dálaigh of the Irish Folklore Commission all recorded her tales. The National Folklore Collection holds photographs of her, searchable on dúchas.ie.
Peig was on the Leaving Cert course (Ireland’s final school exam) until the 1990s. Generations of Irish teenagers blamed her personally.
One common mistake online: Peig was not on the island for the evacuation. She moved back to Dunquin in 1942 and is buried there.
Muiris Ó Súilleabháin: Fiche Bliain ag Fás (Twenty Years A-Growing)
Muiris Ó Súilleabháin (1904 to 1950) spent his early years in Dingle after his mother died. He came back to the island as a boy speaking only English.
Fiche Bliain ag Fás (“FIH-heh BLEE-in eg FAWSS”) came out in 1933. The English version, Twenty Years A-Growing, appeared the same year, translated by Moya Llewelyn Davies and George Thomson. E.M. Forster wrote the introduction.
Muiris joined the Gardaí (the Irish police) in 1927 and drowned while swimming near Galway in 1950. If these books tempt you to try the language, here’s how to learn Irish online.
Who owns the Great Blasket now?
After the evacuation, most of the land stayed in private hands. In 1989, under Charles Haughey’s government, the Oireachtas (Ireland’s parliament) passed an Act to make the island a national historic park. The Supreme Court struck it down as unconstitutional in July 1999.
In February 2009, the Irish Times reported, the State paid €2 million for 17 of the 25 landholdings, including the old village. Some property, including Peig Sayers’s house, stayed private. The OPW now manages it as a heritage site.
Does anyone live on the Great Blasket today?
Not as a permanent community. Census returns recorded four people in 1986 and 1991, and two in 2006. But every summer, two people get one of the most-wanted jobs in Ireland.
Billy O’Connor and Alice Hayes set up the Great Blasket Island Experience in 2014, with guest cottages and a coffee shop on the island. Each year they hire two caretakers for the season, roughly April to mid-October.
Reports from 2021 describe no mains electricity and no hot running water, with a small wind generator to charge phones. When the caretaker job went viral in 2020, over 23,000 people applied within days, and more than 40,000 in the end, BreakingNews.ie reported. In 2021 they capped it at the first 300.
The Blasket Centre in Dunquin
If you can’t get out to the island, go to the Blasket Centre (Ionad an Bhlascaoid) instead. It sits on the cliffs at Dunquin, 16km (10 miles) from Dingle on the R559, the Slea Head Drive. It first opened in 1993 and was refurbished in 2022. It has exhibitions on the island’s story, a café and bookshop, and a clifftop viewing platform outside.
Heritage Ireland lists the 2026 season as 6 March to 8 November, daily from 10am to 6pm, last admission 5.15pm. Adults pay €5, a family ticket is €13, and under-12s go free. The Centre’s own site gives slightly different dates and child prices, so check before you travel.
How to visit Great Blasket Island
The Great Blasket is on my own list. Here’s what the OPW’s official visitor page says.
When and where the ferries run
Ferries usually run from 1 April to 30 September, roughly 10.30am to 5pm, weather permitting. Some operators sail into October. The Atlantic decides, not the timetable.
The ferries are privately run and licensed. They sail from Dunquin, Ventry or Dingle, and the crossing takes 20 minutes to an hour. The OPW lists five operators: Blasket Islands Ferry, Blasket Island Ferries, Dingle Bay Charters, Marine Tours and Dingle Bay Speedboat Tours. Check times and prices with them directly.
What to expect when you land
There is no pier, so the last stretch is by inflatable boat. That means the island is not wheelchair accessible.
There are no public toilets or other facilities, so bring water, food, rain gear and good shoes. The OPW gives free guided tours of the old village, and the average visit lasts about an hour and a half.
Seals, seabirds and bad days
The Blaskets are a protected Special Area of Conservation. They are important for breeding grey seals and, according to the National Parks and Wildlife Service, at least 11 breeding seabird species. If the weather stops the boats, the OPW suggests its online tour. Pair it with the Blasket Centre and a drive around Slea Head, as covered in our best Irish road trips.
Great Blasket Island FAQ
Why was Great Blasket Island evacuated?
Emigration had left an ageing population of just over 20 people, and storms could cut them off from doctors and supplies. After a young islander, Seán (Seáinín) Ó Cearnaigh, died in 1947 without medical help, the islanders asked to be moved.
When was Great Blasket Island evacuated?
The official date was 17 November 1953. Some accounts say one family stayed on into 1954, which is why that year also appears.
How many people lived on the Great Blasket?
The census peak was 160 people in 1911. By 1951 there were 27, and about 22 were left at the evacuation (the Blasket Centre counts 21).
Can you visit Great Blasket Island?
Yes. Ferries sail from Dunquin, Ventry and Dingle, usually from April to September or October, weather permitting. The final landing is by inflatable boat.
Does anyone live on Great Blasket Island now?
There is no permanent community. In summer, two caretakers run the guest cottages and coffee shop.
Who was Peig Sayers?
Peig Sayers (1873 to 1958) was a storyteller who married into the Great Blasket. Her autobiography, Peig, was a Leaving Cert text for decades.
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