Toreigh Education

Tory Island or Toraigh (Irish, Oileán Thoraigh, formerly Oileán Thúr Rí), off the coast of Donegal is 5 km long and 1 km wide.

Just north of the lighthouse the protestant cemetery

is filled with shipwrecked taxmen and a lone sapper,

Fullerton washed ashore one August day.

Nearby, westerly winds whip a Mexican wave

of marsh grass around a weathered school desk

marooned on fractured mirrored sheets of water.

I squeeze into the grey seat, winded, mindful

there’s so much to learn, like how to live here

listening to the mechanical buzz of the corncrakes.

Yesterday the Minister for Education dropped in

by helicopter and announced a teacher for every two pupils,

if you count the priest who speaks eleven languages.

What do the kids need to learn? Irish irregular verbs

and the way words shift beginnings and end?

How to hold their drink in the island’s only pub?

Or how to drive on the one kilometre of straight road?

What about calculus, the certainties of history,

post-colonial studies? Or Balor, king of the fomoires,

devils exiled to this place. His eye bedded in his forehead

petrifies what it sees. His prison is wedged into sea cliffs

on the far side. Waves spin onto the rock walls

scattering brightness, the crying gulls blow white.

A winch rusts on the headland above a beach,

now that the fishing's gone a new curricula advises

‘Don't let your mind wander’, take an apprenticeship

in the Tiger economy and leave this gaol

with its heritage of wind, rain and spray.

Corncrakes calling vibrate the way back to ‘town’

as lapwings guide spotted chicks away from our path,

we search patiently and finally, in the field next to the last house,

or the first, wall haemorrhaging, impatiently stuffed back

and nailed tight with sheets of plywood, we catch a rare sight,

the golden bird skulking by the hedge near extinction.

John Clare called the bird "a sort of living doubt".

It disappears; speckled camouflage completing a soft

shimmer in afternoon light whispering from surrounding sea.

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Toreigh Island Warning