Island of the Bones

Daniel Coll Again - Oilean na Marbh - Dead People with No Future
The Graveyard Mass - Bridge of Tears

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Dead People with No Future

There are other places on the island that keep the memory, as well of the remains of people, but they are ‘people without names’ (O’Shea). As Tom and I were returning from Oilean Na Marbh, he showed me a place in the low ground near the slender waist of Inis Bo Finne. John O’Shea also pointed to the same unremarkable spot.

Both told me that there were bodies of sailors that drifted ashore buried in that place. They were dead men that had no future. They had no past either, at least as far as this community was concerned. Only the older men remember this unmarked spot. Since after World War II there haven't been any occurences of drowned men coming ashore. If there were, the Garda would be called in, and the bodies repatriated - given back to the earth of their fathers', re-patriated. Tom McGinley told me that in times past, out of Christian decency, the islanders buried the unknown here, no sacred ground, and not made so by their washing up here.

There is about the people a fear that they also haven’t a future any longer. This needs to be better said, but I don’t know how to speak it directly without missing the truth of the matter, which cannot be declared. It is like a ghost, invisible except when wearing clothing - still invisible but the shape of the clothes, in our case the stories that are told, outline the figure of the creature. Its not that the old men are afraid of dying, it’s more like a sinking sensation of extinction - You'll not see their like again. Tom told the story about the Cromwellian extinction of the people of Inis Bo Finne, not like John Murphy told us years earlier - with an unslaked thirst for justice. No, Tom told me sadly, and the sadness was about final quiet or silence. His faith has him facing the grave with hope. The story about the island of the bones is about a hopelessness that dogs his faith, an unrequited fidelity to his ground..

I think that these people are much different than me. I think of my self as alive in the present, the past is gone but full of causes; the future is nothing but prospect. There may be a different kind of sense here - in which the now is much differently real - eternity’s indebtedness to the past.

The chapel on Inis Bo Finne. The island people built it around 1965 under the leadership of Canon Shields.

John O’Shea told me he had offered Canon Shields, a priest gone now but still revered by people of Inis Bo Finne, one of his fields, to be a graveyard, but the offer wasn't taken. John is of a mind that if there were a burial ground on Inis Bo Finne, people would not have left the island. Canon Shields did provide building materials for the chapel, and the islandmen did the construction. After that, Canon Shields would come in Sunday afternoons for Inis Bo Finne. But he never took John's offer, and Inis Bo Finne has no one's predeceased here.

The county council for Donegal is just now bringing in the electric line - in July 2000 the cable was on the island, but none of the islanders had yet been hooked on it. Its rolled end sits at the end of Moorish Dan’s meadow, not far below the ‘cork of Inis Bo Finne’, the sparkling white quartzite glacial erratic boulder that may well be the Bo Finne’s present form - from a distance at sea, the boulder could be mistaken for a white cow in the grass, it's about he right size. And the council had drilled a well, which with electric pump, would be a central, pipe-distributed source of good water to the island homes. In the next year or two that project will be completed. Most say is comes too late to save the island. Tom McGinley told me, “Joe, were just visitors now, the electric won’t bring us back.”

The "Cork" of Inis Bo Finn sits in Morris Dan Coll's meadow. It is said that if the boulder is ever moved, Inis Bo Finne will sink into the sea. The electric cable comes along the seabed from the mainland, about two miles distant, and onto the island just behind the rock.

There were times when it seemed there was an envy Inis Bo Finne had of the Tory people, who continue permanent occupation of their island, a further five miles on from this island. But they have some sense that the Tory Islanders made a devil’s bargain. “They have to act like Tory people all the time”. This, a short hand way of noting that the cost of the funds and support that allow development and continuation on Tory, is a thoroughgoing involvement in the visitors industry - tourism. Sara Coll, originally a Rodgers from Tory, says that "the music and the pubs are going on all the time now", no one is doing any of what she recognizes as work - fishing, farming, homemaking - active as they are acting out the script that visitors hope to experience while on the island.

O’Shea points out that they have a graveyard on Tory - their former selves are present, not like Inis Bo Finne. The Inis Bo Finne people are buried, the ones not lost at sea, on the mainland, in the graveyard at Gortahork. Because this is so, it made it easier or maybe possible for the island to be vacated, when the school closed down, and Mary Cannon McGinley was transferred out in 1981. The islanders had no dead on Inis Bo Finne, none for whom they were the future.

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Joe Ferry