As winter looms, the evening is so pitch black on Inis Meáin that the few street lights across the sea on Inis Mór make Kilronan look like Manhattan. In the silent night, voices travel, and the low murmur of people chatting leads to the Halla Naomh Eoin, which doubles as the local community centre and the school – the beating heart of the least populated of the Aran Islands.

Inis Meáin hosts one of the country’s few all-Irish boarding schools and it is full of life, always oversubscribed with teenagers enthusiastically embracing island life and its language. Tonight’s meeting is about what will happen in a few years, when these students – both locals and outsiders – become adults, and whether they can settle on the island, rear families, continue to speak Irish and infuse the community with vibrancy.

The impediment on Inis Meáin is housing. Irish-speaking adults who want to live here have few options as prices have gone through the roof for the tiny number of homes that come on the market. Meanwhile, restrictive planning laws mean locals cannot build new homes for their children on their plots.

Ireland’s islands are an essential part of Irishness, an integral part of our heritage and culture and one of the last bastions of Irish as a living, working, breathing, everyday language.

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Tonight’s meeting is organised by a group of young Gaeilgeoirí activists called Tinteán (“níl aon tinteán mar do thinteán féin”), whose basic message is that if young Gaeilgeoirí can’t afford to live in the Gaeltacht, it will die very soon. Ironically, we are just a few hundred yards from the cottage where JM Synge spearheaded the Gaelic Revival.

Without people, there........

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