Peig Sayers’s narrative, also underscoring the straitened circumstances she endured, appears in more than one book, accenting certain episodes differently in each of them. Muiris Ó Súileabháin’s work Fiche Blian ag Fás (Twenty Years A-growing), a more lyrical and poetic account of life on the same island, places more emphasis on the joy and carefree nature of youth for most of its length, making the spectre of emigration and change all the more effective when it finally appears. The image of a hard life lived against the background of an unforgiving environment is nowhere more evident than in Tomás Ó Criomhthain’s classic An tOileánach (The Islandman), which appeared originally in 1928 but whose definitive edition had to wait until 2002.
The publication in the 1920s and 30s of the Blasket island books The Islandman, Peig and Twenty Years A-growing, first in Irish and, subsequently, in translation in English and in other languages, promoted a certain kind of Irish identity which the newly emerging state was able to capitalise on. Island autobiographies and memoirs are synonymous with the emergence of a strong voice in Irish language writing, something new for a people who had previously been represented primarily in English by outsiders. Róise Rua: An Island Memoir, by Pádraig Ua Cnáimhsí, translated by JJ Keaveny.
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