An island paradise – even if it left me quite windswept

Having beaten thousands of applicants from as far afield as Mexico and Argentina, the young couple will run the island’s B&B and cafe for the summer season – all without the benefit of running water or electricity.

Personal experience dictates the Great Blasket is no place to be without serious rain gear – even in July.

Aeons ago, four of us celebrating the end of our exams hired a boat and motor for a camping trip – only to emerge rain-sodden, wind-blown wrecks after the longest weekend of our young lives.

In his autobiography, The Islandman, Tomás Ó Criomhthain remarked: “The likes of us will not be seen again.” No idle boast.

He recalled going to a wedding on the mainland during a particularly stormy October in 1920, and ending up marooned for three weeks in Dingle as gales lashed the coast.

When he eventually returned, his island family were shocked to see him, believing him drowned on the journey. Ó Criomthain’s simple home has been carefully restored by the Office of Public Works (OPW) – a suitable testament to a generation who endured conditions of such harshness we can only imagine.

Uninhabited now, save for the summer tourist season, the island’s population peaked at 176 in 1916, drifting steadily downwards to the final 22 evacuated in 1953.

Later this year, I’m planning to revisit the scene of our student lost weekend – this time comfortably in a rental cottage.

I’ll swim in the crystal waters of Trá Bhán and climb the steep hillside to view the silhouette of Fear Marbh as dusk falls.

Without my mobile or any connection to the real world 5km away, Micheál Ó Cearna’s memoir, From Great Blasket to America, will be my only entertainment – island life that stayed with him even across more than 5,500km and 60 years in Springfield, USA.

“I can’t get the island out of my mind, it has stayed with me all of my life. There was no court, no doctor, no priest, but we didn’t need them.”

Looking over to Ireland from this solitary place apart, I’ll picture the childhood of Gearóid Cheaist Ó Catháin - the last person born on the island, made famous as “The Loneliest Boy In The World” in a 1948 newspaper article.

“I lived happily there until I was six years old,” he recalled of a childhood where the nearest in age was his 30-year-old uncle.

“The old people were my playmates, we did everything together – shearing sheep, catching rabbits, cutting turf and sailing in the naomhóg.”

To see everyone as the same age in a private domain untroubled by jealousy, greed or hate – truly a magical world.