If the world’s your oyster — this island is your pearl

West Skeam, in West Cork’s Roaringwater Bay, is looking for a one-in-a-million buyer. Tommy Barker reports

Ten years ago, Wicklow-born couple Sarah and Leonard Donnelly happily landed on West Skeam, in West Cork’s Roaringwater Bay, for a clutch of good reasons, but mostly for their children (and the dogs.)

They’ve Leinster roots, sailing and salt in the blood, and now have West Cork links as long and deep as trawler nets, having spent the last decade plying the inlets of Roaringwater Bay and the Ilen River. Leonard Donnelly had the good fortune, and foresight, to sell a telecoms company very successfully in 1999 before the dot-com crash, and has been entrepreneurially engaged in the sector ever since, both as an ‘angel’ investor and globe-trotting company executive, and he’s also current chairman of the Digital Hub in Dublin. The Donnellys landed on West Skeam after it was put up for sale in 2002 by its then-owner, the pioneer of lateral thinking Edward De Bono for $1 million, and before that it was owned by US artist James Turrell, who got it as part-payment for his work on Lissard House’s heavens-inspired Sky Garden. Former fighter pilot Turrell even put a landing strip on the island’s grassy central core, proving its allure for high-fliers of all hues. Before Turrell, West Skeam had been occupied by generations of the O’Regan family, from the late 19th century to the 1950s, and who farmed it, grazed cattle and fished for lobster, crab and shrimp.