Inishark or Inishshark (), sometimes called Shark Island, is a small island neighbouring the larger Inishbofin in

County Galway County Galway ( ; ) is a Counties of Ireland, county in Republic of Ireland, Ireland. It is in the Northern and Western Region, taking up the south of the Provinces of Ireland, province of Connacht. The county population was 276,451 at the 20 ...

Ireland Ireland (, ; ; Ulster Scots dialect, Ulster-Scots: ) is an island in the North Atlantic Ocean, in Northwestern Europe. Geopolitically, the island is divided between the Republic of Ireland (officially Names of the Irish state, named Irelan ...

Overview

The island is now uninhabited; the last 23 inhabitants of this former isolated fishing and farming community were evacuated on 20 October 1960. The islanders had been unable to leave for months in winter and the government opted to resettle them on the mainland rather than build an expensive pier on the island. Like Inishbofin, Inishark is composed almost entirely of

Silurian The Silurian ( ) is a geologic period and system spanning 23.5 million years from the end of the Ordovician Period, at million years ago ( Mya), to the beginning of the Devonian Period, Mya. The Silurian is the third and shortest period of t ...

slate Slate is a fine-grained, foliated, homogeneous, metamorphic rock derived from an original shale-type sedimentary rock composed of clay or volcanic ash through low-grade, regional metamorphism. It is the finest-grained foliated metamorphic ro ...

s and

shale Shale is a fine-grained, clastic sedimentary rock formed from mud that is a mix of flakes of Clay mineral, clay minerals (hydrous aluminium phyllosilicates, e.g., Kaolinite, kaolin, aluminium, Al2Silicon, Si2Oxygen, O5(hydroxide, OH)4) and tiny f ...

s. It rises almost to

above sea level Height above mean sea level is a measure of a location's vertical distance (height, elevation or altitude) in reference to a vertical datum based on a historic mean sea level. In geodesy, it is formalized as orthometric height. The zero level ...

. The documentary film ''Inis Airc, Bás Oileáin (Inishark, Death of an Island)'' produced in 2007 by C-Board Films for TG4, told the story of the last years and abandonment of Inishark. Produced and directed by Kieran Concannon, it featured interviews with surviving islanders and archive newsreel footage of the final evacuation. In 2009,

Boston College Boston College (BC) is a private university, private Catholic Jesuits, Jesuit research university in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1863 by the Society of Jesus, a Catholic Religious order (Catholic), religious order, t ...

's Irish Studies program (in cooperation with

Irish Film Institute The Irish Film Institute (IFI; ), formerly the Irish Film Centre, is both an arthouse cinema and a national body that supports Irish film heritage. The IFI presents film festivals, retrospectives and curated seasons, along with independent, I ...

) screened ''Inis Airc, Bás Oileáin (Inishark, Death of an Island)'' as part of the Irish Studies Film Series telling the evacuation story from the surviving islanders' viewpoint.

History

The island was occupied for thousands of years and has many Bronze Age sites such as burial grounds and monuments. The name Inishark, Irish ''Inis Airc'', may derive from an ancient chief or king named Erc; other writers connect the name with ''searc'', "love" (Old Irish ''serc''), or with Old Irish ''airc'' meaning "hardship" or "

strait A strait is a water body connecting two seas or water basins. The surface water is, for the most part, at the same elevation on both sides and flows through the strait in both directions, even though the topography generally constricts the ...

." The island's patron saint was Leo of Inis Airc, who lived there sometime between the sixth and eighth centuries. The remains of a 19th-century church named after him lie on the island today. On Easter Sunday, 1949 three young islanders drowned travelling to Inishbofin for mass. Soon afterwards, during a period when the island was cut off due to bad weather, another young man died from appendicitis. These incidents as well as emigration were contributing factors driving the clamour to evacuate the island, as by this point there were few young people remaining on it.

Demographics

The table below reports data on Inishhark's population taken from ''Discover the Islands of Ireland'' (Alex Ritsema, Collins Press, 1999) and the

Census A census (from Latin ''censere'', 'to assess') is the procedure of systematically acquiring, recording, and calculating population information about the members of a given Statistical population, population, usually displayed in the form of stati ...

of Ireland. Census data in Ireland before 1841 are not considered complete and/or reliable.

References

External links

*
''Inishark, Death of an Island''
Contemporary ''Daily Mirror'' story about the day the island was evacuated. 1960-10-27.
''The surviving residents of Inishark''
: Narrated documentary slideshow about Inishark and its surviving residents produced for the fiftieth anniversary of the evacuation of the island. Cyril Byrne. ''The Irish Times'', 2010-10-20.
Inis Airc: Bás Oileán – Youtube Videovox hiberionacum - Early Irish Christianity and Early Medieval Ireland
Islands of Connemara Uninhabited islands of Ireland {{Galway-geo-stub

Overview

History

Demographics

See also

References

External links