Irish Examiner view: Sourcing toilets for Peig’s island

There is currently no public toilet on An Blascaod Mór.

The most maligned woman in Irish literature suffered yet another indignity in recent days.

Peig Sayers’ autobiography has been the focus of much performative criticism over the years from those who had to study the book for their Leaving Certificate Irish examinations. Of course, it would take little rebranding to market her story as a triumph of feminist identity, but that’s a matter for another day.

As reported by the Irish Examiner last year, her former home on the Great Blasket was the location of worse insults to her memory than dismissal of her memoirs. 

In 2022 the island caretakers, Brock Montgomery and Claire de Haas, said that they had routinely seen tourists “peeing or pooping” in the derelict building where the Sayers family had once lived — there were no public toilets on the island, so visitors had little choice.

Correspondence has now emerged which shows the excruciating detail of the Office of Public Work’s efforts to source and provide toilet facilities on the island.

Last year's caretakers of An Blascaod Mór reported daytrippers to the island using the former home of Peig Sayers as a public toilet. Picture: Noel Sweeney

As reported here yesterday, the trail of emails on the type of toilet, its precise location, and the matter of access to the toilet goes into the process in all its particulars.

If those who complained about reading Peig as teenagers felt that wasn’t an exciting text, they would be well advised to compare the Office of Public Works correspondence on who would be entitled to get a key for the Great Blasket toilet.