Knitting: A Dying Craft
on the Aran Islands?
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MARY O'FLAHERTY is a fourth generation Aran Island knitter who was born and raised in Kilronan, the main town on Inis Mor.
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By SHARON GREER
Cycling around Inis Mor was really the best mode of transportation during my summer visit to that idyllic island off the west coast of Ireland. Every day brought a point of interest into focus and it was on one of these glorious days that my sister and I happened upon the home of Mary O'Flaherty.
Mary is an Aran Island knitter, born and reared in Kilronan, the main town on Inis Mor. After her marriage she found herself living in the middle of the island in an area called, Fearann an Choirce (Oatquarter), and it is here where we discovered this feisty, indomitable woman.
Mary can't quite remember when her mother taught her knitting, but she knows she was very young, perhaps around the tender age of four or five. She is a fourth generation knitter on her mother's side and some of the most difficult patterns were taught to her by her grandmother.
As she got older she became so adept at this craft that she was able to teach the younger children at school. Her father was a fisherman who plied his trade during the winter months. Mary and her mother would knit over the winter and when summer came, she said, "you hung out your sweaters and hoped that someone would come along and buy them."
The lack of sheep on Inis Mor really puzzled me as the Aran Islands are so famous for their sweaters. Mary explained that the sheep grazed during the summer months on Brannock Island located off the west coast of Inis Mor. Mary herself purchases her wool from the woollen mills of Donegal and Kerry.
Back in the early part of the Twentieth Century there were a lot of sheep on the island and the majority of this wool was used for personal purposes. It wasn't until the 1932 film, The Man of Aran, filmed on Inis Mor, that tourists came looking for sweaters and the industry really took off.
Mary explained about the use of a material called breidin that was used for men's clothing - trousers and vests. Breidin was an extremely rough worsted wool material that no one nowadays would dream of using.
There are not many knitters left on Inis Mor, just a handful, and in Mary's words, "Would there be five or six?" Most women on the island can knit but they don't as they have other interests, and the hard cold fact of the matter is that the money is just not there.
If you go out to work you earn an hourly rate but with knitting, Mary said, "if you sat down and figured out what did I earn by knitting that sweater, you wouldn't make the next one. A person has to have a passion for the craft."
A medium sweater takes approximately 56 to 58 hours to knit, a large one can take over 60 hours depending on the size. When people complain about the price, Mary says they've come to the right person and asks them, "Would you work for one euro an hour?"
Up until around 1984 Mary was knitting for the craft shops, buying the yarn herself and just barely breaking even. Then, a man who lived up in Gort na gCapell (a village not far from Oatquarter) who had a jaunting car, would drive visitors around the island.
Anytime he had someone looking for a sweater, he would go to Mary's house and ask, "Mary, have you any sweaters?" If she had, he would bring the tourists to her.
So he nagged Mary for a whole season saying, "Why don't you sell your own work?"
She would reply, "Oh God, sure, who'd come in and buy it?"
And Mary remembers one particular day when the man nearly jumped off the jaunting car and said, "Who buys it in the craft shops when you bring it in? Isn't your work flying off the shelves in the craft shops and why wouldn't it? Are you feeling alright?"
And he turned around on the jaunting car and drove off. He gave Mary a kind of jolt and she sat down and thought, "Maybe he's right."
She put a little sign in the corner of the front window of her home and started from there. That was some 25 years ago.
Over the years, Mary had saved small bits of yarn left over to fill a bag for each school at the end of the big knitting season and the schools were very glad to have it because it meant the children didn't have to go home to ask their mothers to buy them yarn.
Mary always left it open that if a child wanted to knit something, they could always go to her place for help. Over the years quite a few did visit her.
But then, about three years ago, when the schools were opening and Mary was sorting out what she was going to give away, she was told that knitting had been taken off the curriculum. They had no use for the yarn. It came as quite a shock to her.
At least with it being taught at school, the children would learn the basics. "If they saw a pattern they liked they could at least knit a scarf or a hat as a present for Mammy at Christmas."
This made me wonder what would happen to the knitting and sweater industry on the island if interest was completely lost in this marvellous art form.
But something else struck me in my conversation with this plucky woman. Islanders know how to survive. So many of them hold two or three different jobs at a time. They are the most resilient of people and can survive where those from the mainland would not.
Self-sufficiency is a must living on an island. Mary O'Flaherty left no doubt in my mind that she had already survived difficulties in her life and was fully capable of dealing with whatever else was thrown across her prodigious path.
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