![]() ![]() There’s a great deal of pleasantry and hardship in the life of a person who lives on an island like this that no one knows about except one who has lived here - going to bed at night with little food and rising again at the first chirp of the sparrow, then harrowing away at the world and maybe having no life worth talking about after doing our very best. “The most of my life I’ve spent on this lonely rock in the middle of the great sea. Other favourites: Anne Enright and Paula Meehan ![]() Peig Sayers spoke for generations of poor, uneducated Irish women who never had the opportunity to speak for themselves. On this episode of Talking History, Patrick and his guests reflect on the life and work of Kerry storyteller Peig Sayers and why we as a society may not have the full picture of. Though much of what she described was unrelenting hardship, she was, by all accounts, pragmatic and cheerful in the face of it. Elegant prose it isn’t, but there are few authors with a more authentically Irish voice. It doesn’t matter to me that she didn’t place her own words down on paper, for this is only one element in the process of writing. I didn’t study Peig in school I was not scarred by its misery at a tender age, which surely puts me in a more objective position than most to argue that Sayers’ account of life on the Great Blasket Island remains relevant and significant. Her parents were Toms Sayers and Mairad N. Great artist and wise woman that she was, Peig would at once switch from gravity to gaiety, for she was a light-hearted woman, and her changes of mood and face. She was born in 1873 in Baile an Bhiocire, Dn Chaoin, County Kerry. There are plenty of arguments against the inclusion of Sayers in the canon of great Irish women writers, foremost being the fact that she was illiterate in the language she spoke and instead dictated her famously bleak biography, as well as the hundreds of folk stories she contributed to the Irish Folklore Commission. Peig Sayers was one of the most renowned storytellers in Irish tradition.
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