July 1972. I was 11 years old. In a country tense with uniformed killings and violent recrimination, my mother’s Austin A40 made a tortuous one-day journey to Toormore Bay in west Cork.
It was a warm summer, but televised outrage had kept the tourists away, and the nearby beach was nearly empty. We were staying in a caravan park and it was there that we met an English family who had braved the dire warnings of friends and relations to come on a holiday to Ireland.
I quickly became friends with the son, John, a bookish boy with a passion for collecting butterflies. While I lacked both the heart to put the winged insects to death in jam jars that contained balls of cotton wool soaked in rubbing alcohol, and the patience to fastidiously mount them on to strips of white Styrofoam, John’s enthusiasm for the natural abundance of west Cork was contagious. As we walked to the beach every day, clouds of butterflies would scatter before us in skittish abandon. At night, we sat on a rocky outcrop near the beach and listened to the exotic crackle of foreign radio stations on John’s transistor radio while, in our conjoined ignorance, we tried to pick out the constellations in a maze of stars.
Coming from a suburb at the foothills of the Dublin mountains, I could only experience the trip to west Cork as a revelation. The ocean-bound island, the geographical abstraction of my schoolbooks, became a vivid, lived reality. The plants, the insects, the sea, the overhead skies unmoored me. Now I knew for sure that I lived not – or, at least, not only – on a suburban estate but on an island.
For the Greek poet Pindar, the Aegean island of Delos (the birthplace of Apollo) could be seen from the heavens above as a bright star shining below. In Polynesian mythology, islands and stars are similarly linked, based on the practical necessity for island peoples to use the stars to guide them on their millennial journeys from island to island across Pacific vastness. Tracking the nighttime sky in Toormore Bay turned out to be its own kind of odyssey, navigating the stars over the course of those summer days, a stumbling, uncertain journey into a growing sense of island being.
No (hu)man is an island but every (hu)man on the island of Ireland is an islander. This simple fact is widely ignored in Irish life. If islandness or islands are ever discussed, it is always with reference to Ireland’s offshore islands. The island itself becomes an imaginary mainland extending in all directions, obliterating the seas and ocean that encircle it on every side.
The massive shift from sea to air travel in late 20th-century Ireland made islandness feel increasingly abstract, a momentary glimpse of the sea by the air traveller before they disappear into cloudy oblivion. Using the term ‘island’ in reference to ‘Ireland’ can feel loaded, as if any mention of the ‘island of Ireland’ were a declaration of republican manifest destiny, a surreptitious fusion of physical space with political sovereignty.
The nervousness extends to the adjectives. ‘Insular’ is a word no one wants to embrace, tainted as it is with memories of an island cut off from the wider world, isolated by forms of puritanical protectionism that undermined the civic rights and economic prospects of the island’s population. In the parable of Irish modernity, there was nothing splendid in isolation, island being readily invoked as a metaphor for a shrunken form of national chauvinism. Father Ted’s Craggy Island was, in a sense, the parodic version of this experience of reduced possibility.
In more recent times, the Brexit vote on our neighbouring island revived these fears of political insularity. The decision by the majority of the British electorate to withdraw from the European Union seemed like a cautionary tale of where too much island thinking would lead you – to a delusional cul de sac of post-imperial hubris. Island isolation seemed to be irresistibly attractive to the militant xenophobia of populists intent on making a political virtue out of physical geography. In short, for a variety of reasons, islands were fine to visit or to rhapsodise about on tourist cameos, but acknowledging, imagining or thinking about the inescapable condition of being an islander – beyond ecumenical gestures in the area of North–South co-operation – has remained stubbornly offshore in political and cultural debates on the island of Ireland.
Ignoring the fact of living on an island is a luxury its inhabitants can no longer afford. Olwen, a geology lecturer in Caoilinn Hughes’s novel The Alternatives, reflects on the consequences of climate change for her students: “Olwen can feel the muscles around her mouth straining, like coastal infrastructure that won’t hold much longer. For now she doesn’t situate the moment in deep time for them. She doesn’t tell them how soon the drumlin they’re studying will be underwater. How long before the ancient story written there will be lost.”
Ireland’s Greenest Places longlist: ‘Those with an acute sense of a warming world stand out’
The Central Bank of Ireland, in a 2024 study of flood risk to every residential and commercial property in the Republic, identified storm surges – those storm-induced events of flooding and rising seas – as a big risk to the two million properties in the State in the coming years. Compounded by the increasing intensity of storms, rising sea levels make flooding an inescapable part of near-future weather scenarios. The steady erosion of the east coast, with its soft sediment terrain of sand and gravel, further heightens island vulnerability to extreme weather events. The climate emergency has brought the island nature of Ireland into sharp and urgent focus. Islanders are faced with dilemmas that are unique to their situation.
Living in Dublin, I cannot jump on a train to Paris. I must choose to go either by boat or plane, weighing the environmental cost against the time, degree of planning and expense involved in choosing one option over the other. When the sea surrounds you on all sides – and is rising – it is no longer possible to pretend that Land Is All That Matters. Making room for the river, the sea and the ocean is no longer a cultural perk but an existential necessity.
In 1972, the year of that fateful journey to west Cork, JC Beckett offered a definition of the Irish historian’s task that would have surprised few readers: “The history of Ireland, like the history of any other country, must be based on the study of the relationship between the land and the people.” The comparison, however, is misleading. Ireland, unlike many other countries, is an island. This makes its past and present different from many other countries. The proper study of the relationship between the (is)land and its people must embrace both the maritime and the terrestrial dimensions of the lives of islanders and offer a decidedly more pragmatic approach to Ireland’s current problems than one that ignores or wishes away our watery contours.
Island thinking is concerned with the conjoined examination of sea and land, not the fetishisation of one at the expense of the other. Integrating island thinking into every area of public policy, from economy and security to education and the arts, is an exercise in connection not withdrawal. Seas separate, but they also bring together. Just as the environmental systems on the island of Ireland are inextricably bound up with global, environmental structures, we see that peoples, artefacts and belief systems found on the island bear the unmistakable stamp of their passage through other cultures, lands and sea channels. Clonycavan Man’s use of an imported hair gel from south-western France or northern Spain during Ireland’s Iron Age, about 2,300 years ago, is an anecdotal nod to this extended history of island travelling and connectedness.
Islands can be configured as prisons (Birdman of Alcatraz), incubators of romance (Love Island) or places of refuge (Desert Island Discs), but they are also routinely recruited as sites of utopian imaginings. Part of their role in myth and literature, from St Brendan’s Isle of the Blessed to Francis Bacon’s Bensalem, has been to keep the future open, to ensure its capacity as a laboratory of possibility where other worlds can be dreamt into being. In a context of climate crisis and regressive authoritarianism, hope can be a vanishingly scarce resource. Yet learned helplessness is an unforgivable, if understandable, abdication of responsibility. It is necessary to learn to be good island ancestors, to bequeath to future inhabitants an island that is a place of continuous flourishing rather than a site of terminal extinction.
Colm Tóibín has noted how, as agrarian reform gained pace in late 19th- and early 20th-century Ireland, the attention of visitors and writers shifted to Ireland’s offshore islands: “as land reform came to Ireland, an idea that was in the air grew more intense: that a special energy could be found on the islands – the Blasket Islands as well as Aran – and some of the edges of the western coastline”. A vogue for romantic primitivism quarantined the islands as timeless reminders of lost or dying civilisations. The associated imagery became a staple and enduring feature of tourist representations of the island as a whole.
Keeping the future open, however, means dealing with a living, evolving island, not the picture-postcard fantasies of an island preserved in the aspic of regret. An open future entails not so much a culture of triumphant possession (“[y]ou will possess this island for ever”) as a culture of meaningful dwelling – a knowing, respectful and sustainable engagement with the land and seas that sustain the existence of all island peoples.
Michael Cronin teaches in Trinity College Dublin and is the author of Ireland: Why It Matters to be an Island, published by Royal Irish Academy Publications.