Joyce Flynn on Ireland

Ireland’s Atlantic-facing western coast is home to the country’s most dramatic scenery: the Dingle peninsula and the Blasket Islands, the Cliffs of Moher, Galway Bay, Connemara, the rocky Aran Islands, and the craggy coast of Donegal in the north. McDonagh’s The Cripple of Inishmaan is set in 1934 on Inishmaan, the middle Aran island, and at least four of his characters (Billy, Helen, Bartley, and Babbybobby) are eager to travel to the largest island, Aran Major, where the American documentary filmmaker Robert Flaherty is filming Man of Aran.

The Aran Islands form the western edge of Europe, a stark setting familiar to students of Irish literature because of the writer John Millington Synge’s extended visits there, his one-act tragedy Riders to the Sea (1904), and his prose narrative The Aran Islands (1907). Synge, a Trinity college graduate, was living the life of an expatriate would-be writer in Paris when he met William Butler Yeats, who urged him to travel to the Aran Islands to get in touch with the essential Ireland. Yeats was of course romantic in his nationalism, but the Irish-speaking west in its isolation had preserved not just Irish Gaelic, the westernmost of the Indo-European language family, but also tales and customs from an earlier era.

The past seemed less distant on the Aran Islands: daily life had improved little over the centuries given the extreme poverty of the residents. Robert Flaherty, in search of a location suitable for a planned documentary of Man against the Sea, was advised by an Irish acquaintance to choose the Aran Islands. The Irishman promised Flaherty he would find there a place where life was so primitive that the islanders had to make soil by hauling seaweed up the cliffs and mixing it with sand to join a top-soil in which to grow potatoes … where the curraghs which they used were little better than the coracles of the ancient Britons.

Celtic Ireland had been divided into four provinces: Ulster in the north, Munster in the south, Leinster in the east, and Connacht in the west. Connacht came to represent the old Gaelic and Catholic order pressed nearly to the sea by English invasions and settlements. The land confiscations following Oliver Cromwell’s victory in the mid -seventeenth century were labeled “To hell or Connacht,” as thousands of Catholic landholders were forcibly removed from other areas of Ireland and resettled in Connacht, the province with the fewest natural advantages.

The west of Ireland became a metaphor for an Ireland uncolonized and unanglicized, an image popular with some cultural nationalists. In James Joyce’s short story “The Dead,” the protagonist Gabriel Conroy is called a “West Briton” by another party guest, who attempts to persuade him to take his vacation in the west of his own country. Gabriel’s wife Gretta is in fact from Galway, the capital of the Irish-speaking west, and after hearing her account of the dead young boy from Oughterard, Gabriel watches the snow and decides that it is time to begin his own journey westward, a direction rich in implications. The Irish language summer school, an institution commencing with the language revival, is still a thriving western business. During the Irish Free State under Eamon DeValera, the Gaeltacht (Irish-speaking) districts of the west achieved privileged status as the reservoir of spoken Irish, a policy of deference and modest subsidies which threatened to ossify other aspects of western communities. Many young people from western Ireland continued to seek opportunity in North America, England, and Australia.

McDonagh’s west, created from summer visits to his father’s family in Connemara and Galway, observes the oddity of Inishmaan’s closer links with Boston than with Dublin, London, or Europe. His characters regard a trip to Aran Mor as a major adventure, and American culture in the form of candy brands and Hollywood is making inroads. The west of McDonagh’s 1934 Inishmaan is already partly defined by its sense of an off-island world, predominantly that of a huge island further west yet.

Joyce Flynn is a Research Associate in Celtic Literature at Harvard University.