Aran Islands
The Aran Islands are three islands located at the mouth of Galway Bay.Irish is the spoken language on all three islands, and is the language used for the names of the islands and many of the island's villages and place names, but the islanders will happily converse in English with visitors.
(Things to write about: Currachs, poet Martin O'Direan (sp?) )
Population figures are from the Census 2002.
This is the largest island with a population of 831. The port Kilronan (Cill Rónáin) is the main village of the island, with a population of 270.
There are several Iron Age forts on the island, including Dún Aengus (Dún Aonghasa) and Dún Dúchathair.
Despite not being the smallest island, it is the least populated (187 persons) and least tourist orientated island.
The smallest island, with a population of 262. Ferry service from both Rossaveal and Doolin.
There is currently no direct service from Galway city.
A ferry service operates from Rossaveal and an air service is available from Inverin, both of which have connecting buses from Galway city. Of note is the Queen of Aran ferry service, run by Islanders.
One of the major figures of the Irish Renaissance, Liam O'Flaherty, was born in Gort na gCapall, Inishmore, on 28 August 1896.
The islands have had an influence on world literature and arts disproportionate to their size. The unusual cultural and physical history of the islands has made them the object of visits by a variety of writers and travellers who noted their experiences.
Beginning around the late 19th Century, many Irish writers travelled to the Aran Islands; Lady Gregory, for example, came to Aran in the late nineteenth century to learn both Irish and Kiltartan.
Many wrote down their experiences in a personal vein, alternately casting them as narratives about finding, or failing to find, some essential aspect of Irish culture that had been lost to the more urban regions of Ireland. A second, related kind of visitor were those who attempted to collect and catalog the stories and folklore of the island, treating it as a kind of societal "time capsule" of an earlier stage of Irish culture. Visitors of this kind differed in their desires to integrate with the island culture, and most were content to be considered observers. The culmination of this mode of interacting with the island might well be Robert J. Flaherty's 1934 classic documentary Man of Aran.
One might consider John Millington Synge's The Aran Islands as a work that straddles these first two modes, it being both a personal account and also an attempt at preserving information about the pre- (or a-) literate Aran culture in literary form. The motivations of these visitors are best exemplified by W. B. Yeats' advice to Synge: "Go to the Aran Islands, and find a life that has never been expressed in literature."
In the second half of the twentieth century, up until perhaps the early 1970s, one sees a third kind of visitor to the islands. These visitors came not necessarily because of the uniquely "Irish" nature of the island community, but simply because the accidents of geography and history conspired to produce a society that some found intriguing or even beguiling and that they wished to participate in directly. It should be emphasized that at no time was there a single "Aran" culture: any description must be necessarily imcomplete and can be said to apply completely only to parts of the island at certain points in time. However, those visitors of this third kind that came and stayed were attracted to the aspects of Aran culture that were:
Instead, they looked directly towards ways in which their time on the island put them in touch with more general truths about life and human relations, and they often took pains to live "as an islander," eschewing help from friends and family at home. Indeed, because of the difficult conditions they found -- dangerous weather, scare food -- they sometimes had little time to investigate the culture in the more detached manner of earlier visitors. Their writings are often of a much more personal nature, being concerned with understanding the author's self as much as the culture around him.
This third mode of being in Aran died out in the late 1970s due in part due to the increased tourist traffic and in part to technological improvements made to the island, that relegated the above aspects to history. Perhaps the best literary product of this third kind of visitor is An Aran Keening, by Andrew McNeillie, who spent a year on Aran in 1968.
A fourth visitor to the islands, still prominent today, come for spiritual reasons often connected to an appreciation for Celtic Christianity or more modern New Age beliefs, the former of which finds sites and landscapes of importance on the islands. Finally, there are many thousands of visitors who come for broadly touristic reasons: to see the ruins, hear Irish spoken (and Irish music played) in the few pubs on the island, and to experience the often awe-inspiring geology of cliffs. Tourists today far outnumber visitors of the four kinds discussed above. Tourists and visitors of the fourth kind, however, are under-represented as creators of literature or art directly connected to the island; there are few ordinary "travelogues" of note, perhaps because of the small size of the island, and there are no personal accounts written about Aran that are primarily concerned with spirituality.
No bibliography of the Aran islands would be complete without mentioning Tim Robinson's Stones of Aran: Labyrinth (1986) and Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage (1989), and his accompanying, very detailed, map of the islands. It is an exhaustive, but not exhausting, survey of the Aran geography and its influence on Aran culture from the iron age up to recent times.
It is only very recently that the islands have had reliable electricity and communications. Many blame the dying out of Irish speaking among young members of the islands community on English-language television, available twenty-four hours a day since the 1980s; furthermore, many younger islanders leave for the mainland when they come of age. Irish is spoken less by the younger generation, although a causal visit to the island will show people of all ages conversing fluently in the language.
Most jobs on the island are in fishing or in the tourist industry. Islanders differ in their attitude towards visitors; generally speaking, however, islanders are friendly but also sometimes desirous of preserving their own cultural traditions and therefore occasionally distant. Such a visitor-visited dynamic arises in many situations elsewhere in the world where a small, closed culture becomes an object of fascination for a much larger group.
Pub life can be raucous, and islanders sometimes gather in the evenings to share music. You are as likely, however, to come across folk singing as a television tuned to the latest reality television program from America. It is worth remembering also that the islands are very small, and that island residents are all known to each other. This can intensify the feeling for some visitors of a sense of intrusion.
The islands are the home of a style of sweater that has gained world wide appeal during the course of the 20th Century. Geography
Inis Mór 'the big island'
Inis Meáin 'the middle island'
Inis ÃÂirr 'the south island'
Getting There
Literature & Arts
Local Artists
Visiting Artists
For these reasons, the Aran Islands were "decoupled" from cultural developments that were at the same time radically changing other parts of Ireland and Western Europe. Though visitors of this third kind understood that the culture they encountered was intimately connected to that of Ireland, they were not particularly inclined to interpret their experience as that of "Irishness." Culture Today
Aran Island Sweater