Rocky outpost off the coast of Ireland
By Conor Creighton
The Aran Islands, off the west coast of Ireland, haven’t changed much in the last fifty years, which makes them the perfect example for modern sustainable societies.
While the rest of Ireland was bypassed, rezoned and paved to death in the ’90s, the Aran Islands suffered minimal development. The three islands, with a combined population of around 1200, got a broadband connection two years ago but apart from that, islanders are still biking along the same roads their great, great grandfathers built.
The islands are both incomparably beautiful and charmingly quaint. They’re sectioned into tiny, stonewalled fields, each with its own name. When it rains—every time you look up—the deluge polishes the stones, making the islands look like upturned whale bellies, rather than any place a person might call home.
The natural beauty is complemented by the harmony of the islander’s lifestyles. They grow their own food, catch their fish and up until very recently, when a law was passed forbidding it, slaughtered their own animals.
Meet the Locals
Paraic, a farmer who lives in a typical whitewashed stone cottage, has a lifestyle that’s a suburban eco-warrior’s dream. His diet is completely organic and the food miles on his plate could be counted in footsteps. If the dish he’s preparing lacks a certain flavor, he steps out his back door and picks a suitable herb.
Cooking came late to Paraic. He began cautiously, frying up the odd steak and preparing vegetables, but encouraged by the reception to his culinary endeavors, the burgeoning chef came into his own.
“We tried to do the vegetarian thing, even though I’m not into it,” he says amiably. “You have to give them something—a turnip on a plate.” He laughs heartily and the table buckles with the reverb. Paraic now caters for large groups of archaeologists who visit. Occasionally they find a burial ground and samples are sent to universities around the world with the urgency of a Medevac operation, while the islanders snigger knowingly at the desecrated remains of some stray dog’s grave. Paraic’s cooking, however, is an unqualified success.
Although a shuttle boat runs twice daily between the islands and the mainland in clement weather, sometimes the sea’s wildness cancels sailings for days at a time. Niamh, from a wealthy suburb of Dublin, feels it worse on those nights. A trained chef who speaks German, Spanish and Irish, Niamh lives in a small trailer and prepares all her food on a barbeque you might pick up at a gas station for ten bucks. Her choice of a primitive life on the island stems from wanting to compensate for the environmental damage occurring elsewhere. Not all the islanders understand her philosophy. Some think she’s fallen on hard times and extend the island tradition—leaving a bag of their long-time staple, potatoes, at the door. But Niamh is comfortable and content in her monastic existence, and wouldn’t change it for the world.
Reveling in Solitude
The islands have long been revered as a spiritual oasis. In the first millennium, a fearsome Irish warrior named Edna, tamed by the love (and loss) of a woman, set up one of the earliest monasteries. When his wife died, Enda retreated to the islands to begin a life of isolation and establish a monastery so severe that no fires were permitted for warming the faithful. The Catholic Church must have approved, for he’s since been canonized.
Michael is a modern-day Enda, who took working remotely much further than his employer imagined. When Michael’s wife died two years ago, he wanted to start a new life, so he asked his boss for permission to work from home. He sold everything in Toronto and relocated to a small cottage that was notorious for being the draftiest home on the islands. From this humble location he does proprietary trading on the U.S., European and Asian markets. The six-screen set up on his kitchen table looks odd beside a bowl of unwashed spuds and a block of butter, but his explanation of his decision to ditch a major city for a small rock on the rim of the Atlantic is very reasonable.
“A city of four million sitting back-to-back hunched over Blackberries texting the same five people and refusing to talk to each other? I have more of an active social life here than in Toronto.”
The islanders now call him Micháelin Micháel Roger, a local name for an island on which surnames are not recognized. It’s a combination of his own name, his nickname and the name of his landlord, and a letter addressed that way will arrive straight to his door. Michael has been branded an islander but his farming neighbors still can’t understand how a day in front of a computer can constitute work. His hands are too clean, they say.
What’s New Is Old
You might identify the Aran Islanders as part of the new breed of organic-conscious, sustainability-oriented greens, but there’s nothing new about their lifestyle. For years they’ve been living in harmony with the land, and as they say in the small pubs that stay open long after the mainland is fast asleep, “On an island, you don’t escape nature. You either treat it with kindness or it blows you off.”
Conor Creighton is a Berlin-based writer of fiction and journalism.
