Inis Oírr, Sunshine, and a whole lot of fluff

Bon appetit

May 19, 2025

Listening to: Simulation Swarm - Big Thief

Good eve fair maidens and mateys,

How’re we all doing with this glorious sun? The birds are basking, the evenings are stretching and you can have your clothes dried within the hour isn’t it incredible. Look I’m not going to go there but I did watch a video of an Australian guy saying “Yeah we thought it was great too until we got 7 years of drought” and at the time I thought “Can’t we just have one little bit of blessed enjoyment?!” and now 3 weeks later I’m like “hm”. But look I said I’m not going to go there OK!!!

I will say the sun facilitated a truly magical trip to Inis Oírr this week where I was with the Do Anything (/Drop Everything) crowd working with TY students (4th year of secondary school for my many international readers) on a project putting their own stamp on their outside space. There was a group of architects building a pavilion with them as well as landscape gardeners, carpenters, photographers and filmmakers. I was invited to facilitate the painting of their basketball/tennis courts. We had grand plans, then a mix up with the paints arriving and so there was a lot of winging it, which is a pretty comfortable space for me.

There were early starts and lots of hard work but also many delicious pints in the evening and incredible food prepared by a chef on the team, ensuring the glorious harmony of exhaustion from hard manual labour coupled with the reward of exquisite treats. I annoyingly did not bring my togs but on the second day I called into the bean-an-B&B who kindly loaned me one. This was very fortuitous for that evening after dinner we got to enjoy the sauna; a converted walk in fridge with wood panelling and a little stove inside, and a window looking out to the sea. We did the whole swim-sauna-swim-sauna routine under the night sky and at one point I was there floating on my own in the sea looking up at the stars, my body warmed on the inside while my skin tingled all over.

"On the morning of 8 March, 1960 during a severe storm, the Plassy, a general cargo freighter owned by the Limerick Steamship Company, was wrecked on the Finnis Rock located circa 1km off-shore in the South Sound. Some weeks later, another storm threw the ship up on the rocks and it has remained there ever since."

Inis Oírr has a population of 300 people while Inis Mór has about 800 (duno about Inis Meain - just looked it up and it’s the least populated at just 184 people!). The Aran Islands are a Gaeltacht and it was extra special being around a whole island communicating in Irish passing each other on the roads and in the pub. I did try my cupla focal but wish I’d made more of an effort now. There is an option for Transition Year students to join Coláiste Ghobnait for that year to be part of the community and practice their Irish, so most of the young people I was working with were from all over the country (Kildare, Dublin, Mayo). This ensures the school has the mandatory minimum 25 students to keep it open.

It is a beautiful place; lots of dry stone walls, a big rusty shipwreck full of crows, a large lake with an eerie feeling and lots of horses, cows (possibly Dexter breed) and their baby calves. The main beach is like something from the tropics. Golden sand and crystal clear water and there are big smooth rocky landscapes all over. There’s a castle on the hill which I didn’t even make it up to (this may be the fault of the pints).

I can only dream of exploring the other two islands. Or I could actually do it, who knows. I brought Hagstone by Sinéad Gleeson to read as I thought it would be fitting but I barely had time to finish the first page.

I feel I have taken up a lot of your time now. I can’t think what to whittle away the rest of it with. I have my Q2 moodboard (finally) but I think I’ll save that for another post. Maybe you’ll just have to be content with the rest of the diary entries. I don’t really know how to communicate about the horrors of what’s going on in Palestine, I’m sure we are all tuned in to the same things. It’s enraging to see Israel given a platform (a literal stage) at Eurovision, but it’s hard to expect anything else these days. Although I shouldn’t say that as we have to believe in an alternative, we can’t lose hope for something else because then we will stop trying. And how easy would that be, to give up. There is a cloud hovering over daily life isn’t there and it’s hard to know how to direct your energy into something practical and meaningful.