’Loneliest boy in the world’ is sole survivor of Blaskets evacuation

In 1948, newspapers dubbed Gearóid Cheaist Ó Catháin the ‘loneliest boy in the world’: he was the sole child on the Blaskets, and now is the only surviving evacuee of 1953-54, says Áilín Quinlan.

IT was Christmas Eve, 1948, when reporter Liam Robinson and photographer Donal MacMonagle arrived at the jetty on the Great Blasket Island. The duo stayed on the island for three days, until St Stephen’s Day.

Their mission? To meet the last child of the Blaskets — Gearóid Cheaist Ó Catháin, then 18 months old and living with his parents in the primitive fishing village of Bun a’ Bhaile, which had no electricity, doctor, school or priest — for Sunday mass, the community rowed three miles across open sea to the village of Dún Chaoin, on the mainland. Robinson’s subsequent article was syndicated around the world. It made Gearóid famous.