Laethanta Saoire: Vacation

Finally, another part of the Aran Islands’ identity comes from being a Gaeltacht. Although Oliver Cromwell did arrive on the islands during his conquest of Ireland in the mid-17th century and set up a defensive fort there, he eventually left with his troops. The population of the islands increased afterwards, as some people from the mainland moved to the Aran Islands to escape the reach of the English. Because inhabitants were ultimately less harried by the colonizers, the Irish language was able to persist. Today, Irish remains the first language of the islands.

Máirtín Ó Díreáin is credited, along with his contemporaries Seán Ó Ríordáin and Máire Mhac an tSaoi, for breathing new life into Irish language modernist poetry. While other writers of the Gaelic Revival took up older and more structured forms of verse, often those developed in Ireland centuries ago that involved strict meter, Ó Díreáin instead preferred to write in a metered free verse. While also grounded in the Irish tradition of poetry, he still looked to other culture’s poets for influence, one of which he often alluded to being T.S. Eliot. Additionally, while other revivalist poets used an older, more classical style of language, Ó Díreáin wrote in the modern Irish that he grew up speaking on the islands.