The following day, we head to Inishturk by mailboat. Jack Heanue, a Turk native, is our driver. His accent is thick, some might say unintelligible. He has a licence to carry up to 12 people, but today it’s just ourselves, his nephew Eamonn and the postbags. Jack sits on the driver’s seat, the suspension adjusting to the lift and fall of the waves so that he bobs up and down gaily like a carousel horse. I hang over the back of his seat, pointing at gizmos on the dashboard, asking what they are. He turns on the sonar so we can see the sea bed, a jagged, pixelated orange line that runs across the black screen like a stuttering beat on a heart monitor.
Where Bofin’s harbour is large and well-sheltered, built in a natural bay, the approach to Turk is trickier, bringing you into a man-made harbour with a narrow entrance. Where Bofin’s topography is gentle, with more flatland and rolling hills, Turk’s edges rise sheer from the ocean in a series of dramatic cliffs. Turk is smaller and further out, with a population of just 50, a third of Bofin’s. But it’s not only these factors that make this community feel so remote. The difficulty of navigating the harbour means the island is more susceptible to being cut off in extreme weather. Partly because of this, and the delay in proper infrastructure being developed, tourism here is a much more recent, and modest, phenomenon than it is on Bofin. Jumping from Jack’s mailboat to the pier, the atmosphere of the place is completely different to its neighbouring island. There are fewer people, less activity, less of a sense of movement or a feeling that there’s anywhere to move to.
We’re told Paddy O’Toole will speak to us. He’s coming in off the ferry at three, they say. Meet him in the harbour, they advise. We go at three and find Paddy tying a tarp over a trailer full of coal on the pier. He’s perhaps in his late 70s and has apparently just manhandled the tonne weight bags onto the trailer himself. We approach and introduce ourselves. He regards us with, if not suspicion, at least reserve. Who are you writing for, he wants to know. What do you want to talk about, he asks. He tells us he has to unload the coal into a shed across the bay (pointing) and that he’ll talk to us after, in 15 minutes or so. ‘Follow me over, on your ease.’
We watch him drive off towing the trailer and begin to dawdle after at snail’s pace. Within five minutes we’re across the bay and Paddy and a helper are about two bags into what has to be a load of at least 20. We sit on a wall at a discreet distance from the men and watch them work as the gloom of early evening closes in. Every so often, Paddy and his helper pause in their work to survey the bay. It’s agonising.
Half an hour later, the shower that has been threatening all afternoon breaks. ‘Paddy! It’s raining!,’ I call. He smiles wryly, ‘Sit into the jeep here with me until it passes.’
The three of us clamber into the jeep together, the helper having disappeared into a house. Rain patters on the roof, some blowing back through the open passenger seat window to spray Al in the face. Paddy keeps telling us the shower will blow over but we sit for an hour in the darkened jeep talking and the rain doesn’t stop. Like Tommy on Bofin, Paddy is an amateur historian and the conversation ranges across time periods and peoples, peppered with unusual (if sometimes questionable) facts.
‘There have been people here for seven and a half thousand years. There’s a temple out the back of the island called Teampaill na Muice [Temple of the Pig]. There were people here practicing… well, let’s just call it a religion. They worshipped a spiritual pig, who they thought had magical and destructive qualities. Inishturk takes its name from that time [Turk meaning wild boar].’
He tells us about industries that once existed in this part of the world, now long gone. Growing flax for textiles was a major one around the turn of the 19th century, with Turk residents cultivating their own and using it to make fishing nets. There’s also a good deal of lore attached to the brewing of booze on the island, one legend recounting how the last Danish inhabitant watched the murder of his own son and then flung himself into the sea rather than reveal his secret Norse recipe for heather beer to the Irish.
It seems strange that a region once so vibrant with activity and life (it’s claimed that the population of Turk was 600 prior to the famine), has dwindled to a population of just 50 people, most of whom are over 40 years of age. There are just two children in the school, Caitlin and Ryan, brother and sister. Unless something drastic happens in the next three years or so, they will likely be the last pupils the school sees. This decline is all the more perplexing, given the improvement of access to the islands in the last 20 years. As Simon Murray on Inishbofin points out, it’s easier now to live on the islands than it has been at any point in history. Turk got both electricity and its first ferry in the early 1990s. Prior to the ferry, islanders would come and go in fishing boats. Before the construction of the current pier in 1996, it wasn’t possible to hold boats in the harbour during the winter months and islanders were dependent on boats coming from neighbouring islands to collect them. The community centre, which houses the first and only pub on the island, was built in 1991 through voluntary efforts and fundraising.
Like all the islanders, Paddy is immensely proud of his home. He still grows his own vegetables, still rears his own meat. When asked what he thinks the future holds for Turk following talk of the possibility of depopulation and the threat of a cut in funding, he’s matter of fact.
‘When you get used to automation, it’s very hard to go back to the old ways again. We’ve almost forgotten about them now. The ability to improvise and adapt is, I’m afraid, a thing of the past. There are ample resources on every island to develop if the people involved are determined to develop them. That’s easier said than done. Whoever takes on enterprise of any nature will have to be determined and stick to it ’til the bitter end. You need people with entrepreneurial drive in them and thrust to go forward, people who won’t be knocked down at the first hurdle.’
There’s a lot of talk of outside help for the islands: the funding programme from the government that has been in place in one guise or another since the mid-1980s, the rumours of a fish farm to be built off the coast near Turk that could potentially create jobs on the island. But for a sustainable long-term solution to the threat of depopulation, the real hope seems to lie in the ability of the next generation of native islanders to harness the rich history and natural bounty of these places that they love so well to create opportunities for themselves, as islanders have always done.
‘These are the last outposts of where people in Ireland came to for refuge. Monks came here in the 7th century to break away from the centralization of the Catholic church in Rome. They’re hugely important sites of resilience. It’s important to keep them populated because people managed here in times when things were a lot tougher than they are now. I think it’s really crucial to the psychology of a nation to maintain these outposts.’
