A Pity Youth Does Not Last : Reminiscences of the Last of the Great Blasket Island's Poets and Storytellers

Michal O'Guiheen was the son of Peig Sayers, `the Queen of the Gaelic storytellers'. People came from far and wide to visit her, and her story is told in An Old Woman's Reflections. She is fondly recalled in Miche'al's memoir of his island childhood amongst the weather-beaten crofts and fishermen's cottages. The last of the Blasket's celebrated poets and storytellers, he describes how the isolation of his youth was slowly eroded by the creeping of civilization across the three miles separating the islands from County Kerry, and the sadness of leaving the Great Blasket for the last time.