Peig was illiterate in the Irish language, having received her early schooling through the medium of English. In the 1930s a Dublin teacher, Máire Ní Chinnéide, who was a regular visitor to the Blaskets, urged Peig to tell her life story to her son Mícheál. He recorded them and brought them to the attention of the academic world. Flower was keenly appreciative of Peig Sayers' stories. The Norwegian scholar Carl Marstrander, who visited the island in 1907, urged Robin Flower of the British Museum to visit the Blaskets. She and Pádraig had eleven children, of whom six survived. Peig moved to the Great Blasket Island after marrying Pádraig Ó Guithín, a fisherman and native of the island, on 13 February 1892.

She had expected to join her best friend Cáit Boland in America, but Cáit wrote that she had had an accident and could not forward the cost of the fare. She spent the next few years as a domestic servant working for members of the growing middle class produced by the Land War. She spent two years there before returning home due to illness. At the age of 12, she was taken out of school and went to work as a servant for the Curran family in the nearby town of Dingle, where she said she was well treated. Her father Tomás Sayers was a renowned storyteller who passed on many of his tales to Peig.

She was called Peig after her mother, Margaret 'Peig' Brosnan, from Castleisland. p. 303.She was born Máiréad Sayers in the townland of Vicarstown, Dunquin, County Kerry, the youngest child of the family. (from Irish to English) Moya Llewelyn Davies & George Thomson. Baile Átha Cliath ( Dublin): Clólucht an Talbóidigh.

Fiche Bliain ag Fás (in Irish) (First ed.).

Ó Súilleabháin drowned on 25 June 1950, while swimming at Knocknacarra off the Connemara coast. In 1934, Ó Súilleabháin left the Guards and settled in Connemara. He joined the Garda Síochána in Dublin in 1927 and was stationed in the Gaeltacht area of Connemara, where he kept up contact with Thomson. Aged eight, he returned to Great Blasket Island to live with his father, grandfather and the rest of his siblings, and learnt the native language. Personal life įollowing the death of his mother when he was six months old, Ó Súilleabháin was raised in an institution in Dingle, Co. ĭylan Thomas commenced, but did not finish, a filmscript of Twenty Years a-Growing. Such interest was tied up with romantic notions of the Irish primitive, and thus when Ó Súilleabháin tried to find a publisher for his second book, Fiche Bliain faoi Bhláth (in English, Twenty Years a-Flowering), there was little interest, as this narrative necessarily departed from the romantic realm of turf fires and pipe-smoking wise-women. Forster described the book as a document of a surviving 'Neolithic' culture. Forster, their praise at times had a condescending tone. While Fiche Blian ag Fás was received with tremendous enthusiasm by critics, including E.M. Thomson edited and assembled the memoir, and arranged for its translation into English with the help of Moya Llewelyn Davies. It was Thomson who encouraged him to join the Gardai rather than emigrate to America as most of the young people did. Ó Súilleabháin was persuaded to write his memoirs by George Thomson, a linguist and professor of Greek who had come to the island to hear and learn the Irish language. As one of the last areas of Ireland in which the old Irish language and culture had continued unchanged, the Great Blasket Island was a place of enormous interest to those seeking traditional Irish narratives. Fiche Blian ag Fás ( Twenty Years a-Growing) was published in Irish and English in 1933.

Peig irish name