Inishbofin--An Atlantic Island

I RELAND'S decline in population has been made possible by the availability of work elsewhere for her people. This article deals with one of the poorest and most isolated districts of the country, an island off the west coast which, for over 60 years, has received government help in various forms, as well as money from relations in America and in Britain. And the island, Inishbofin, has a reasonably contented community not untypical of many in the west of Ireland, all of them Roman Catholic in religion and depending on the priest for the main leadership. Emigration continues, but those left behind and those who return to the island have a leisured way of living rarely encountered in the modern world. As will be shown later, however, the island people maintain their simple but not uncomfortable way of living only by help from outside: if one believes that every inhabited area must make its economic contribution to the state, Inishbofin is a debtor on a considerable scale. A small and dwindling population maintain a precarious existence on the Atlantic fringe of our industrial society and present upon the whole an aspect of decline and, in some parts, of dereliction. In these words the Scottish crafting report' names a problem, common alike to the Atlantic fringe of Ireland and of Scotland, which was investigated by two Congested Districts Boards, in Ireland from 1891-19232 and in Scotland from 1897-19113; in both countries the powers of these boards were transferred to the general administration of agricultural affairs. One by one the islands off the west coast of Ireland are being abandoned4 but on Inishbofin this prospect does not seem immediate: past and present government assistance has resulted in a planned *The material for this paper was partly collected during a visit with the Geographical Society of Ireland in July, 1954. The author visited about half the houses on the island of Inishbofin, and for one-quarter of the 96 households recorded the numbers of the household, information on those who had emigrated, the area of the farm, number of stock, methods of selling produce, and other sources of income, such as fishing or work on the roads. Within this range the answers were generally reliable, but no direct financial inquiry would be fruitful and on Inishbofin the number of sheep was almost invariably understated as there are jealousies between households about the use of commonage (see p. 205). In one case a farmer told the writer that he had half-a-dozen sheep or so but the following morning he had 23 lined up in his field for the dealer to see. It was impossible to resist the comment over the garden wall, A fine lot of sheep this morning. Other aspects of Inishbofin are discussed in three articles in Irish Geography, Vol. 3, 1956, pp. 123-135, by J. P. Haughton, T. Jones Hughes, and J. A. K. Grahame. 1 Department of Agriculture for Scotland, Report of the Commission of enquiry into crofting conditions. H.M.S.O., Edinburgh, 1954, Cmd. 9091, para. 281, p. 87. 2 For a general treatment, T. W. Freeman: Geogr. Rev., Vol. 23, 1943, pp. 1-14. 3 Cmd. 9091, 1954, para. 265, p. 81. 4T. W. Freeman: Geogr. Journ., Vol. 120, 1954, p. 332

Biology · Fishery · Geography · Geology · Island Studies and Pacific Affairs · Oceanography