Peig sayers biography channel

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Margaret Sayers, daughter of Thomas Sayers, married on 13 Feb 1892 at Ballyferriter RC chapel, Dingle, co Kerry to Patrick Guiheen, son of Michael Guiheen. But the course of her life changed when her fare failed to materialise. Peig moved to the Great Blasket Island after marrying Pádraig Ó Guithín (Patrick Guiheen), a fisherman and native of the island, on 13 February 1892.

She and Pádraig had eleven children, of whom six survived.

The Norwegian scholar Carl Marstrander, who visited the island in 1907, urged Robin Flower, of the British Museum, to visit the Blaskets.

The books were not written by Peig but were reminiscences which she dictated to others.

Peig is among the most famous expressions of a late Gaelic Revival genre of personal histories by and about inhabitants of the Blasket Islands and other remote Irish locations. In her younger days, Peig had hoped to emigrate to America. The movement swiftly found itself the object of some derision and mockery – especially among the more cosmopolitan city dwellers of Ireland – for its often relentless depictions of rural hardship.

Peig arrived on Great Blasket Island, 3 miles off the tip of the Dingle peninsula, after wedding Pádraig Ó Guithín, a local fisherman. Although essentially a personal account of her upbringing on the mainland, her marriage to a Blasket man, and her middle years as a wife on the Island, her autobiographical Peig draws frequently on traditional tales to illustrate her observations.

The often bleak tone of the book is established from its opening words:

The book was for a long time required reading in secondary schools in Ireland. At age 12, she was taken out of school and went to work as a servant for the Curran family in the nearby town of Dingle, where she said she was well treated. She was called Peig after her mother, Margaret "Peig" Brosnan, from Castleisland.

https://civilrecords.irishgenealogy.ie/churchrecords/images/marriage_returns/marriages_1892/10629/5872460.pdf

They moved to Great Blasket Island. It was published in 1936.

Over several years from 1938 she dictated 350 ancient legends, ghost stories, folk stories, and religious stories to Seosamh Ó Dálaigh of the Irish Folklore Commission.

She continued to live on the island until 1942, when she left the Island and returned to her native place, Dunquin.

As a book with arguably sombre themes (its latter half cataloguing a string of family misfortunes), its presence on the Irish syllabus was criticised for some years.

It led, for example, to this comment from Senator John Minihan in the Irish Senate in 2006 when discussing improvements to the curriculum:

In Paddy Whackery, a television show on the Irish language television channel TG4, Fionnula Flanagan plays the ghost of Peig Sayers, sent to Dublin to restore faith in the Irish language.

Her father Tomás Sayers was a renowned storyteller who passed on many of his tales to Peig. While the census may have listed Peig's occupation as housewife or homemaker, her true calling was that of seanchaí, linking present day Ireland with the lore, traditions and history of previous generations - at a time when the Blaskets and the Gaeltacht in general were under increasing pressure from the outside world.

She is buried in the Dún Chaoin Burial Ground, Corca Dhuibhne, Ireland.

She was moved to a hospital in Dingle, County Kerry where she died in 1958. She dictated her biography to Micheál.