Inis Turbot tragedy recalled in new video that draws on old poem

The ‘new islanders’ of Inis Turbot in North Connemara have joined with some of its original residents to commemorate the tragic deaths of three men that prompted the island’s evacuation over 40 years ago.

Using a poem written in the aftermath of their death at sea, a music video has been produced which pays tribute to the ‘Turbot Men’ who lost their lives to the sea in 1974 as they made the short journey home from Clifden to the island, located at the end of Sky Road.

After visiting Clifden on September 23, 1974, to watch that year’s All-Ireland football final between Galway and Dublin on television, Turbot fishermen Patrick Stuffle, Micheál Wallace and Patrick O’Toole were lost at sea. Their boat was found one day later, but it took three weeks to find the men’s bodies and lay them to rest on Turbot.

Living conditions on the island had been becoming more challenging in the years before their deaths, as the turf ran out and emigration led to a declining population.

Four years after the tragedy at sea, a mass evacuation left behind a population of just seven, who by 1981 had also left for the mainland.

By the mid-1990s, life had begun to return to Turbot as holiday homes were bought up by visitors from at home and abroad, and it was in 1994 that Dutch advertising executive Stefan Frenkel, together with his wife and three children, bought their house.

“I came 38 years ago to Inishlacken off the coast of Roundstone – friends of my wife had a little house there and invited us. She was from Holland and Hanneke, my wife, knew her. Our children were two, four and six and we stayed there for a couple of weeks and absolutely fell in love with the place,” says Stefan of his love affair with Ireland, which had begun years earlier when he visited on a fishing trip at just 20 years old.

“When I had a little bit of money, I said ‘maybe it’s possible to buy somewhere in Ireland’. We looked around, first in Mayo and this area [around Clifden] but we could not afford it. In the end, we visited an auctioneer and he said there were houses for sale on Turbot Island and there were many of them,” he recalls.

On their first visit to Turbot, fisherman John O’Toole brought Stefan, Hanneke and their son Kasper out by boat, and showed them the abandoned houses, which Stefan remembers still had ashes in the fireplaces, full cupboards on the walls, and all the hallmarks of the sudden evacuation of almost 20 years previously.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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