The islands off Ireland’s coast have long exerted a powerful hold over filmmakers and programme-makers, from Man of Aran to Father Ted. This hallowed milieu is now revisited in Trasna na dTonnta, a gently fascinating portrait of outsiders who have made these windswept outcrops their home (TG4, Monday, 8.30pm).
Until recently, newcomers to the islands were often bohemian types lured by the idea of living on the fringes of western Europe. Global upheavals have changed the formula and in part one the focus is largely on migrants from war-ravaged Ukraine.
Their stories are moving, and you have to feel for the younger immigrants plucked from the bustle of huge cities in eastern Europe and required to start over in sparsely populated island communities.
The recent arrivals include Krystyna from Mariupol, the Ukrainian city bombed to near-oblivion by Russia, who went with her family to Tory Island off Co Donegal. “We left Ukraine because the war started and our homes were destroyed,” she says.
She and daughter Diana have settled in – even if island life is different from anything they knew back in eastern Europe. “I was always afraid that the sea would rise up,” Diana says.
There is also culture shock on Bere Island in Bantry Bay, Co Cork, where we meet Liudmila Bohodist, who moved there with her son, Arsenii.
He attends school on the mainland and Liudmila, who speaks neither Irish nor English, lives in isolation on the island. But it isn’t all grim – her daughter is in nearby Castletownbere and Liudmila has also somehow befriended two chickens, who arrived at her house unannounced and now pay regular visits.
There is a sense of disorientation, too, for 16 year-old Arsenii, who is adjusting to the Irish education system and life as an Irish teenager.
“It’s very different to school in Ukraine,” he says. “You could say it’s more interesting. In Ukraine they really make you study.”
Not everyone who ends up on an island is fleeing conflict. On Sherkin Island we meet John Simpson from Scotland who recalls being drawn to Sherkin by “the invisible signpost which not many people find”.
The moment he set foot on the island, he knew he would stay, and all these years later, this is where he works each day as an artist.
“Island life is wonderful,” he says, contrasting the peace of Sherkin with the pressure of his old existence back in the UK. “When I was living in England you were sitting in traffic jams going to work.”
Trasna na dTonnta is a quietly engaging profile of uprooted lives and of people who, whether by accident or design, have found themselves at the ends of the earth. It doesn’t have anything earth-shatteringly profound or insightful to say about this state of being but, as an unassuming snapshot of island life, it is full of charm.