The next parish over is Boston

One thing I’ve heard several times in the Dingle Peninsula is that “the next parish over is Boston.” When I first read that phrase several weeks ago, I passed it off as a community’s boast to something uniquely big and fun but ultimately inconsequential (like “home to the world’s largest ball of yarn” or “site of greatest water balloon fight”). I think that’s the case for many of the local youngsters. But having learned more about the area and its former population loss due to emigration, my guess is that the phrase arose out of a longing for family members who’d departed to far away lands.  Saying “the next parish over” was an act intended to close the gap that was the Atlantic Ocean.

 

Home in Dingle Peninsula, circa 1940

Perhaps where this is most readily symbolized is on Blasket Island, a tiny island that blebs off from the tip of Dingle Peninsula, making its now-abandoned village the former western-most European community. The small but hardy islanders survived centuries of weather-beaten, luxury-free living. During the Great Famine (potato blight) of 1840s-1850s, the population dropped from 153 to 97, and during this time the people started looking elsewhere for prosperity. Later in the 1930s (population ~140), in part due to loss of industry when trawlers from nearby cities depleted their local fish supply, the people moved en masse away from the island. Poverty and the lack of any long-term employment at home and reports of abundant work “over there” lured many a young person on the emigrant’s trail. I was surprised that the citizens, who had just won their independence from England, would apparently renounce their homeland to move to the US. A local responded to me, “Despite their great sense of being Irish, if there was no way to survive, then they needed to leave.” The population shrank drastically in just a few decades to below 50, and in 1953, the remaining Blasket inhabitants—all past their prime and unable to have emigrated—left their island and moved into mainland Ireland.

village on Blasket Island, circa 1940

Now, my guess is that in the US we have a more fluid and free sense of mobility than people did in the “Old World.” I can move away from family and into new communities more seamlessly than did my ancestors (no doubt made much easier by modern communication technologies). But for the people of Blasket Island, their sense of community built through generations was presumably much, much tighter. Not only must it have been painful for them to lose their rising generation to emigration, but it must have also been heart-wrenching to lose their families to physical separation. Wrote one man who interviewed a widow:

     “I was inside with an old widow a few nights ago. She had three lovely rooms in her house. Her children are all in America only one son that’s a man here, but not in her house. Imagine her sitting in the corner alone thinking and looking at her empty house which her grandchildren should be playing in and she knows that she will never see her dear ones again.” – Eillis Ni Shuilleabhain

So I watch the sun set on this side of the world, with the breeze picking up and sheep bleating behind me, with birds diving for fish and the waves crashing against Blasket Island. I am grateful for the sacrifices that immigrants made that also helped create the US that we have. But also, I reflect on the longing that the people of this island must have felt. Perhaps they tried to bolster their desire for the success of their progeny to smother any sense of betrayel, and maybe they would look at the setting sun and remember that it shone also on their departed family.

After all, they were just one parish over.