An island lightly moored

Do you not feel that this island is moored only lightly to the sea-bed, and might be off for the Americas at any moment?

Sebastian Barry, Prayers of Sherkin

STANDING by the Cliffs of Moher, where the edge of Europe drops sheer into the Atlantic Ocean, the American poet Wallace Stevens saw not rock, sky or water, but the mythic origins of himself and mankind. This is not landscape, he wrote, ... this is my father or, maybe, lit is as he was, /A likeness, one of the race of fathers: earth /and sea and air.

And he was not alone in thinking of the rugged west coast of Ireland as a place outside history, a strange margin still illuminated by the sun that had risen at the dawn of European civilisation. The Aran Islands, and especially, the Blasket Islands off the Kerry coast, became for European culture generally, a mythic terrain, a place where Odysseus and Nestor still walked the earth and older verities remained true.

The great Greek scholar George Thomson, who spent a great deal of time on the islands and edited Maurice O'Sullivan's account of his early life there, Twenty Years A-Growing, wrote of the Homeric qualities in the life of the Blasket Island: the island of Ithaca had little to offer besides mountain, pasture. `It is a rough place', says Odysseus, `but a fine nurse of men'. One might say the same of the Blasket Island."

The idea of an island had a special importance for the independent Irish State that was established in 1922. For the young country, the Blasket and Aran Islands, had as well as their echoes of Greek myth, a more specific aura of pre-history. They were part of the creation myth of the Irish State in which, as John Wilson Foster has put it "the western island, came to represent Ireland's mythic unity before the chaos of conquest,... at once the vestige and the symbolic entirety of an undivided nation." They were a past that would also be the future. Their supposed isolation had preserved them from corruption, kept their aboriginal Irishness intact through the long centuries of foreign rule. In this way of imagining an island, the sea was not an unstable and untrustworthy element but a stout and solid barrier, a fortification enclosing and protecting the culture within.

These two myths of the islands - as a survival of heroic archetypes, and as the point of origin of an independent - Irish State - were not mutually exclusive and indeed they could be used to reinforce each other, as in Robert Flaherty's famous ethnographic documentary film Man Of Aran. The opening inscription for the film could be read almost word for word as a party political broadcast on behalf of Fianna Fail, which had bust taken power when it had its premiere in Dublin: "In this desperate environment, the man of Aran, because his independence is the most precious gift he can win from life, fights for his existence, bare though it may be." That the cost of independence might be a bare and frugal existence was, after all, the message of, Eamon de Valera, who graced the premiere with his presence.

In Man of Aran, the sea is imagined, not as an ever-changing, always unpredictable force, _but as constant, unchanging, and perennial, a ring of timelessness that holds the mere day-to-day contingency of human life in an unbreakable grip.

This way of thinking about islands became a self-conscious part of the official ideology of the State. The hooks written by the Blasket Islanders' - Maurice O'Sullivan, Tomas O'Crohan and Peig Sayers - were compiled, and placed on the school curriculum, as a record of a culture that had been, and would supposedly be again, emblematic of Gaelic Ireland itself.

In the one of those Blasket Island books drilled into the heads of generations of Irish school pupils, Peig Sayers's An Old Woman's Reflections, there is a snag in the story that threatens to unravel the entire weave of meaning. The book tells of a frugal, deeply religious existence eked out from the rocks and the sea at the very edge of Europe. It is, in general terms, perfectly compatible with Man Of Aran. But the myth, in Peig's telling, becomes strangely tongue-tied near the end.

This happens because another story - of emigration and depopulation, rather than of steadfast continuity - was already under way. Even before the first World War there were more Blasket islanders living in Springfield, Massachusetts, than on the Blaskets themselves. After it, when the fishing industry collapsed, America became not so much an alternative as a goal. In his diary in October 1922 Tomas O'Crohan, author of The islandman, notes a conversation between a woman and her daughter after the currachs have returned for the third consecutive night without a fish caught. What, asks the mother, is there to keep the fishermen on the island? "They will have to leave for America so"' says the daughter. "They do not find it easy to go there either," replies the mother, They need to have fifty pounds - a sum no fisherman has when he has spent the last three years without making a single pound."

As George Thomson put it, "in the old days, only those had emigrated who could not stay at home; now, only those stayed at home who could not emigrate."

This story breaks into An Old Woman's Reflections like interference from a foreign-language drama interrupting a sedate broadcast of Irish traditional music. The narrator's husband dies and no sooner has her son Muiris replaced the last sod over his grave, than he announces that he is off to America. On the morning of his departure, with his luggage ready and his papers on the table beside him, he stands stiff as a poker, his lips clamped, his thoughts somewhere between language and silence. Suddenly he turns on his mother who has been sitting in the corner, watching him with a secret eye. He takes out a package wrapped in brown paper and hands it abruptly to her. She opens it - it is the tricoloured flag of the new Irish State. "Put that away," he says in a voice trembling with inarticulate emotion, "in a place where neither moths nor flies can harm it! I have no business with it from this day out."

The moment, passing between two members of a culture famed for the richness of its speech, is oddly inarticulate, and indeed, Peig herself was aware of it as such. She notes of her son that "the words that jerked out of his mouth were all mixed up because of his emotion." What was going on was, literally, hard to say. The hard-won abstract symbol of Irish nationhood - the flag - had proved to be useless to the living symbols of that same nationhood.

Neither in Irish nor in English were - there easy words for such a moment. It is the kind of history that could only be preserved as a photograph, the handing over of the national flag captured as an intimate and curiously inverted variation on end-of-empire ceremonies everywhere. When epochs like that of the Blaskets' end, (the islands were finally abandoned in 1953), the actual moment of death is marked by such awkward, unregarded moments. SEAS don't separate, they join. The ocean is not a cultural banner but a means of passage. Messages in bottles bob to the surface thousands of miles and, many years from their points of origin. The waves throw objects onto the shore, and they lie mute and inscrutable, all the more alluring for their lack of context. They are found objects, so far from home, so out of place, that it is tempting to toss them back into the water again and forget that we ever saw them.

So it is with the Atlantic Ocean. On each of its shores, Ireland on one side, America on the other, there are distorted echoes of the other - strange, disjointed bits of history from which the salt sea in between has bleached out the meaning. Let us pick up a few of them:

(The following stories are abridged for this extract)

AFTER Sitting Bull was murdered by Native American policemen in 1890, they found a curious medal inscribed with the Latin words Pro Petri Sede (For the Throne of Peter) around his neck. It had been presented by the Pope to an Irishman Myles Keogh for his part in the defence of the papal states against Garibaldi. Keogh afterwards joined the US Seventh Cavalry as a captain and, along with It 5 other Irishmen intent on colonising Indian land, was killed at the Battle of Little: Bighorn in 1876. Sitting Bull took his medal as a trophy, and cherished it until his death, a reminder, through the years of defeat and humiliation, of his people's one great victory over the white man.

ON the other side of the Atlantic, another piece of jetsam was washed ashore.

In the village of Asdee in North Kerry, behind the bar of the Jesse James Tavern, there is a notebook kept by a man who was parish priest there from the 1940s to the late 1960s. Convinced that the ancestors of Jesse and Frank James came from around the village, he collected local folklore about them...

NINETY years ago, a poem in Irish, Ochon A Dhonncha, was published in Patrick Pearse's periodical An Claidheamh Solais, with a translation pinto English by Pearse himself. It is a cry of anguish from the heart of a father whose small son has been drowned and, to anyone reading it, it seems to speak with all the immense dignity of an immemorial tradition. It conforms to literary conventions of lamentation that stretched back at least, three centuries, and to an Irish custom of keening the dead that is older than any literature.

Between the covers of Pearse's nationalist and Gaelic revivalist journal it seems the most vivid and gripping proof of the existence of an unbroken culture, a tradition that had survived both centuries and catastrophes with its purity intact.

Except, however, for two lines in the first verse:

Da mbeadh an codladh so i gCill na Dromad ort no in uaigh san Iarthar mo bhron do bhogfadh, ce gur mhor mo dhocar, is ni bheinn id'dhiaidh air.

(If this sleep was on you in Cill na Dromad or some grave in the West it would soften my sorrow, though great my affliction and I'd not complain.)

Why would a grave in the West of Ireland be a comfort? Because the poem was written, not in Kerry, but in Springfield, Massachusetts, and it is the lament of an emigrant for an American future that has been blighted. Its author Padraig O hEigeaitaigh was born in Iveragh in 1871, emigrated to America 12 years later, moved to Springfield when he was 20 and spent the rest of his life there, working in the Charles F. Lynch Clothing Company. And he wasn't the inheritor of an immemorial tradition of Gaelic culture. He learned to read and write Irish from a book of poems he picked up in the States. His poem for his dead son, this lament for the little American boy buried in St Michael's cemetery in Springfield, came not out of a rich past but out of an emigrant's need for something to take with him into an unknown future in a foreign, land. It was made possible not by continuity but by displacement. And yet it is, for all that, the last great Gaelic lament, not, as Pearse must have hoped, evidence of a culture's survival, but a desperately moving, dying echo of the old world in the new.

IN 1866, 200 members of the Fenian Brotherhood invaded, Canada, carrying a green flag with a golden harp embroidered onto it. Their plan was to conquer the colony, and then propose a swap to the British Empire, offering to give back Canada in return for a free Ireland. The invasion lasted three days before the Fenians were forced to retreat back into the United States. One of the wounded men they carried over the border with them was Timothy McCoy, who in 1848, as a child of three, had emigrated from Glyn, Co Limerick. The family had settled in a Gaelic-speaking community in upper New York state, and Timothy McCoy had grown up as a passionate Irish Catholic nationalist. After the failed invasion of Canada, he married an Irish woman, Cathrin Fitzpatrick from Johnstown, Co Kilkenny, and became chief of police in Saginaw, Michigan.

Their son Tim grew up there with two sets of stories in his ears. On the one hand, there was Ireland. The atmosphere of the house was, as he recalled in his memoirs, Tim McCoy Remembers The West, "nationalistically Irish and devoutly Catholic". Although his mother was 20 when she emigrated to America, his father "always seemed more Irish to me, though I imagine that when she was young she must have been the typical colleen: dainty, pretty, with dark auburn hair, a rosy complexion and an ever present twinkle in her eye." And on the other hand, there were Indians. When he lay on the floor beside the wood-burning stove, he heard the adults talking of "everything from leprechauns to Michigan's frontier days". One Irish neighbour told him such tales of wild Indians that he was often afraid to go to bed.

As soon as he could, he ran off to the West, to Nebraska and Wyoming. He became a cowboy and "it was through cowboying that my association with the Indians began an association which proved my entry into Hollywood". When he first met Indians, Arapahos and Shoshonis, his reaction to them was the same as that of George Thompson to the Blasket islanders or of Robert Flaherty to the Aran islanders, they could not help but strike me as exotic and interesting. Being at heart a romantic, I was intrigued by the possibility, that, having come from an unencumbered, natural state, the Indians were able to look upon the world as we must all have seen it before the influence of civilisation before that time when we forever lost a firm grip upon our own probably common, roots."

But just as he encountered his first Indians, he also fell in with another Irishman, a cattleman called Irish Tom. His proper name was Thomas Walsh and he was raised, much as my father had been, in an American Gaelic-speaking community, as a result of which he had a brogue which could have been rent with a cleaver". From his habit of singing traditional Gaelic airs to Irish Tom's cattle, Tim McCoy, acquired the nickname "Irish Tom's Canary". But while he was singing his Irish songs to the cattle, he also linked up with another cow-puncher, an Arapaho called Buffalo Lodge. From him, he learned the Arapaho sign-language. The image of the two of them, way out, West, the child of a dying Gaelic culture and the child of a dying Arapaho culture, singing the airs of half-forgotten laments and speaking in silent signs comes from the history of an island but tightly moored to the sea-bed...

Meanwhile, on the far side of the Atlantic, the Blasket islanders had become dead Indians. "It's a sad occasion," says Peig Sayers in her book, "when a person leaves for America; it's like death, for only one out of a thousand ever again returns to Ireland." But, although it seemed that way to communities on the west coast, emigration is not a death. Communities, even cultures, die. But lives go on., Even if the individuals never return, their ideas and dreams do ...

THE Blasket islanders themselves dreamed of flotsam and jetsam. They grew tired of being a living museum, the objects of tourist fantasies. One of them, Eibhlis Ni Shuilleabhain, wrote that "Visitors going in and going out of our house talking and talking and they on their holidays and they at home having a comfortable house and no worry during winter or summer would never believe the misfortune on this island, no school nor comfort, no road to success, no fishing ... everything so, dear and so far away. Surely people, could not live on air or sunshine."

But as well as being objects of fantasy, the islanders had fantasies of their own. With no road to success, they dreamed of American bounty washing its way across the waves to them. Tomas O'Crohan, in his diary, recorded the hope of an islandman in 1922 that "Maybe there would be another war too and God would load a fine valuable vessel over in the US and would steer her onto Lochar Rock as he steered the Quebra, a wrecked ship that had provided a fine crop of salvage.

God answered these prayers, but not quite in the way the islanders might have imagined. The Blasket islanders went to America, mostly to Springfield, Massachusetts, but America also came to the bigger island, of which the Blaskets were once an idealised emblem. Movies and multinational companies, dreams and dresses, consumer durables and fizzy drinks, ideas, aspirations and lifestyles, all drifted ashore, released by the wreckage of nationalist myths.

This is the way with Irish culture. The surrounding seas keep nothing out and nothing in. They ebb and flow, carrying things and people back and forth until it is hard to say where they began and where they might end. What was washed up on the shores of Ireland was often, weathered and sea-changed, what had been cast adrift from them a generation earlier.

Looking for a mainland when their home became uninhabitable, the people of the Blasket Islands off the Kerry coast believed they would find a more hospitable landfall across the Atlantic Ocean than across the Blasket Sound. In many ways, their judgment of where the mainland lay showed the navigational astuteness to be expected of a sea-going community. From the America which they now inhabit, Ireland is an offshore island, semi-detached, outlying, a clear field for fantasies.