Tomás Ó Criomhthain (1856-1937) was born on An Blascaod Mór ‘The Great Blasket Island’, described in his autobiographical narrative as ‘a crag in the middle of the great sea’ (‘Carraig í seo i lár na mara móire’, p. 326). He lived his entire life on the island, in the single village which is set into a grassy slope that rises above An Tráigh Bháin (‘the white strand’). Ó Criomhthain writes, as he says, so that there would be some record of the life lived by islanders, ‘for the likes of us will never be again’ (‘mar ná beidh ár leithéidí arís ann’, p. 328). He writes in the rich Irish idiom that flourished in their stories, songs, and ordinary speech, though his terse, expressive style is his own. In this episode Tomás recalls his father, a fisherman and a man skilled in every trade, but it is his mother, with her strength and curses who dominates the recollection, as she hauls kreels of turf up the slope, along with her obstinate child, Tomás. The narrative blends a childhood memory with a story his mother told so often ‘to the old woman next door’ (‘don seanachailligh bhéal doiris’) that it becomes Tomás’s own, told with his incisive wit. The text is edited from Ó Criomhthain’s manuscript and is read by the editor, Professor Emeritus Seán Ó Coileáin, in the Munster dialect. The digital editing for this recording was done by Saimon Clark, Media Editor, Language Centre, University of Cambridge.
