Great Blasket Island evacuation, 60 years ago

Kay Caball at My Kerry Ancestors — one of my favorite blogs/websites — has an interesting post about the November 1953 evacuation of the Great Blasket Island off the Kerry coast.

She writes, “As one of the last areas of Ireland in which the Irish language and culture had continued unchanged, the Great Blasket Island was a place of enormous interest to those seeking traditional Irish narratives.”

RootsWeb, part of Ancestry.com, posted this reproduction of a period news story about the event in the Kerryman newspaper. I also found this excellent 23-minute documentary.