![]() Then the dancing started at the other end of the house and we had revelry and applause till day brightened in the east.” At a send-off for a neighbour who was emigrating to North America, the host produced “a barrel of porter and a gallon of whiskey. What follows could be described as Peig: the boozing and partying years. Those windows were in smithereens by morning.”Īfter her period working at a farmhouse outside Dingle as an older teenager, Sayers returned to Dún Chaoin. The night she returned home bonfires were lit around the town and candles placed in windows as a sign of support, “all except the homes of the loyalists. Sayers then tells of Bríghdín Shráid Sheáin, a Dingle woman who was jailed for six months for refusing to name people who had stolen a horse from the RIC barracks. The townsfolk were beating the police back until a district inspector charged the crowd on horseback. let fly into the peeler’s teeth, lifted him into the air and stretched him on the flat of his back in the channel”. In another incident, a riot, the police grabbed a man who, “with his left hand clenched. Illustration: Illustrated London News/Heritage via Getty The RIC arrested a man, Muiris Ó Sé, in connection with the attack, but he escaped after he “drew a belt of his fist across the constable’s good eye and knocked him out flat on his back”.Ĭonflict: 10 men and a woman were reportedly killed in Ballinhassig, Co Cork, in June 1845, when the Royal Irish Constabulary opened fire during a riot. She describes how a group of men slashed some cattle belonging to a landlord who had evicted relatives of theirs. She enjoyed her time in Dingle, “a place that filled me with wonder”, and also a place where she saw clashes between townsfolk and the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC). On Peig’s final day with the Currans she “ran towards them and put my two hands around Nell’s neck and no daughter ever kissed a mother as fondly as I kissed Nell that day”. ![]() Nell “was a generous, hospitable, pleasant woman and Séamas, her husband, was every bit as good as her”. (The English-language edition of Peig published in 1974 kept the word cúl, presumably to avoid printing its risqué translation.)Īfter primary school Peig went to live and work with Nell and Séamas Curran, who owned a shop in Dingle. She recalls how her heart jumped for joy when she heard her brother Pádraig was visiting one day when he arrived “I ran to meet him he took me up in his arms and kissed me lovingly.” Her sister even says of Peig’s mother’s love for her: “The dear woman thinks it’s out of your cúl the sun rises.” Cúl, in this context, means behind, or backside. One of the book’s key themes is the love between Sayers and her family. Photograph: Keystone-France via GettyĬontrary to popular belief, the book is full of attention-grabbing, exciting and even funny stories. Vanished way of life: farmers in Co Kerry in the early 1900s. While we think of Sayers as an old woman sitting at the fireside, most of Peig is about her life up to the age of 23: her early days in Dún Chaoin, her time living with a family in Dingle from the age of 12, a period she spent working at a farmhouse outside the town, her marriage and move to the Blasket Islands at the age of 19, and the birth of her first son. And even though Sayers’s memoir is about a vanished way of life in rural Co Kerry at the tail end of the 1800s, Silas Marner is about a linen weaver who lived in a northern English slum in the early 19th century, and Macbeth – a play written 400 years ago, in Elizabethan English – is about an 11th-century Scottish king. Yes, the poverty it depicts is a tragedy – but so is the domestic violence of Purple Hibiscus, the organ harvesting of Never Let Me Go and the Nazi occupation of All the Light We Cannot See, all of which are currently on the Leaving Cert syllabus. ![]() The familiar claim is that Peig is such a depressing, unrelatable story of hardship and woe, in which Sayers complains from start to finish about her terrible misfortune, that it puts school students off speaking the language for life. Since Colm Bairéad’s film An Cailín Ciúin was nominated for this year’s Oscars, the newspaper is just one of the US media outlets that have published articles about the Irish language – including, inevitably, her infamous autobiography. Or to be more precise, in the Los Angeles Times.
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