Her father Tomás Sayers was a renowned storyteller who passed on many of his tales to his youngest child Peig. He had lived through the Great Famine of the 1840s but after his marriage to Peig Brosnan of Castleisland their first nine children had died in infancy. The Sayerses then moved to the town-land of Vicarstown, near the village of Dunquin at the westernmost tip of the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry, in late 1872. Six months later in March 1873 their last child was born. She was always known as Peig, after her mother. The Dingle Peninsula was an area of outstanding scenic beauty and, by the time of Peig's birth, one of the last bastions of the native Irish language. (These Irish-speaking areas, called the Gaeltacht, were gradually being eroded by the spread of English.) The region was also being eroded by emigration for it was one of the poorest in Ireland and still very much dependent on potatoes as a staple food. America was a magnet for its young people, and there was a long-established process of chain migration whereby emigrant relatives and friends would send the passage money back to other relatives and friends in Ireland. As the youngest child, Peig was cherished by her parents she was particularly close to her father whom she described as a quiet, sensible man. When she was seven, the family peace was disturbed by her brother Sean's new wife who came to live with them. Her sister-in-law was bad-tempered and took out her anger on Peig and her father. At age 12, Peig was taken out of school and went to work as a servant for the Curran family who were merchants in the nearby town of Dingle. Sayers was lucky in that she was treated well by her employers. In her autobiography, she writes that after two years with the Currans she became ill and returned to Vicarstown, though she does not describe the illness. She and her best friend, Cáit Boland, talked often of emigration, as most of their contemporaries had by now left for America. Then Boland went, promising to send back fare money to Sayers as soon as possible. In the meantime, Peig, expecting the fare within a year, took a job as a farm servant, a notoriously hard form of work. Four years later, Boland wrote Sayers telling her that she had had an accident and would not be able to send the money. Sayers returned to Vicarstown where her brother arranged a marriage for her with Pádraig Ó Guithín, from Great Blasket Island. The Blaskets, a group of islands some miles off the Dingle Peninsula, were places of great beauty in summer, but in winter they were bleak, desolate, exposed to the Atlantic winds, and often cut off for weeks at a time by the dangerous winter tides. Though arranged, the marriage was happy, and Peig soon made close friends on Great Blasket. In 1942, Peig returned to her home of Dunquin where she lived until her death in hospital in 1958 at the age of 85.She and Pádraig had eleven children, of whom six survived. This book would be a very important book in Irish history and was required reading for many years in secondary schools in Ireland. Máire was a schoolteacher from Dublin and she edited the manuscript. She would eventually dictate many folk stories and legend to Seosamh Ó DálaighĪlthough Peig was illiterate in the Irish language, she dictated her biography to her son Micheál, who in turn sent it to Máire Ní Chinnéide. People would gather at Peig’s house in the evenings to listen to her stories in front of the fire. They had eleven children together, six of whom survived. Peig got married to Pádraig Ó Guithín, who was from the Great Blasket Island, in 1892 and moved there with him. Her plan was to join her friend Cáit in America but Cáit was unable to send Peig the price of the fare. Her father, Tomás, was a storyteller and passed stories on to Peig.Īfter leaving school at the age of 12, Peig went to work as a servant. She was an Irish author and seanchaí (traditional Gaelic storyteller). Peig Sayers was born in Vicarstown, Dunquin, Co.
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