In October 1960 David Scott witnessed the last islanders leaving Inishark. The following draws from his essay ‘Death of Inishark’, printed in the Daily Mirror in October 1960.
Shark Island lies seven miles off the Connemara coast. Since men first began to toil, hardy folk have tortured a living out of Shark’s thousand acres of rocky pasture and the sea around it. The farming and fishing community used to be counted in hundreds, but in October 1960 the last twenty-three survivors moved out of Shark like a garrison surrendering after a life time’s siege. The Atlantic beat them and hammered them into submission, cutting them off from the outside world for weeks and months on end. Too often and too easily their tiny landing bay was whipped into a perilous cauldron by even the weakest winds. And over the years, as family after family emigrated, the situation those who stayed grew more desperate.
In 1958 a Shark man died from appendicitis because no word of his plight could be got out for five days. That death sealed Shark’s fate. In October 1960 four boats arrived on the last mercy mission to Shark. The fleet was commanded by young Father Flannery, the island’s priest. Men, women and children staggered along the stony 500 yards between their cottages and the landing stage with their burdens…. a huge, home-made wardrobe lashed to the shoulders of fifty-three-years-old Michael Cloonan. A dark brown cat in an old blackened cooking pot, with the lid half tied down… Eleven-months-old baby Anne Lacey in the arms of her mother… Anne Murray’s geraniums, hens in baskets, geese in sacks, straw brooms and string-tied suitcases, iron bedsteads and baths. Thirteen cows, twelve dogs, ten donkeys. eight more cats, scores of hens, a hundred sheep, a stack of hay -and a tear in the eye of Thomas Lacey, the elder. They all came down to the water’s edge of Shark for the last time.

“Why should I not be happy to be going?” said Thomas, 73.“I’ll not be grieving for it. I’ve wanted to leave for years. This island has had its share of my life. His voice trembled and his eyes glistened. “It gave me only poverty and it took two of my sons,” he said. “Look yonder at that strip of cheating water between the islands. That is where my sons drowned eleven years ago…”

During November and December 1959 there were only six days when it was possible to leave or land on Shark. There was no tea, sugar and paraffin for six weeks. Nights were long when you had only the light of the peat fire to see by. Christmas came and went like that. It was too much. Those leaving the island watched the twelve inhabitable but untenable houses of Shark fade out of life. “That island is finished”, said Thomas Joseph, turning his back on it and pulling noisily on his pipe. A new life awaited the island folk on the mainland. Linkback: https://mountainviews.ie/summit/1382/comment/17543/