An Old Woman’s Reflections

Peig Sayers was ‘the Queen, of Gaelic story-tellers’. She was born in the parish of Dunquin in Kerry and married into a neighbouring island, the Great Blasket, where she spent most of her life. Students and scholars of the Irish language came from far and wide to visit her. She was, as Robin Flower wrote in The Western Island, ‘a natural orator, with so keen a sense of the turn of phrase and the lifting rhythm appropriate to Irish that her words could be written down as they leave her lips, and