Island Futures, Taskscapes and Rural Policy
What Ireland’s Offshore Places Teach Us About Viability Beyond Resilience
In a week when people from across the world are clamouring for the chance to live and work off the west coast of Ireland [https://ipropertyradio.com/live-and-work-on-the-edge-of-the-atlantic-as-great-blasket-island-caretaker-roles-open-for-2026/] – drawn by beauty, isolation, and the wild mysteries of Atlantic windswept shores – it is worth asking not just what makes these places attractive, but what could make them viable for living in the 21st century?
Every year thousands of people from all around the planet vie for the coveted job of caretaker of Ireland’s Great Blasket Island. As the 2026 search kicks off, the annual daydreaming and longing is ignited in more people than will ever apply. And, once again, it highlights global demand for life “on the edge of the Atlantic”. This clever HR campaign taps into an age-old imagination of island life: self-reliant, slow, beautiful, living life on your own terms. Yet that imagery might not ring true to those who were evacuated from such islands through the mid-1900s.
Or maybe it would… to those whose island lives were shaped by evacuation rather than choice.
From my desk in Connemara I look across to the Aran Islands throughout the day. Sometimes wistfully. Sometimes sympathetically. Always with deep curiosity.
I know that the romantic idyll of island living is far removed from the harsh climates and even harsher realities of everyday life on Ireland’s small islands – realities that determine whether people in these wild places endure or disappear.
On the same day that I spent the morning writing editorial for the Blasket Island annual ‘pick me’ PR-bonanza – and wondering in the back of my mind whether it might be possible to reintroduce people to Ireland’s wildest outposts – I find myself returning to Ryan Lash’s Island Endurance; a detailed, scholarly study of creative heritage, labour, and lived experience on Inishark, in dialogue with the lived continuity of Inishbofin. The juxtaposition feels impossible to ignore. The book is not about repopulation, nor is it a policy text. Yet it inadvertently provides one of the clearest ‘sliding doors’ views of Ireland’s island futures that I have encountered.
Two Islands, One Moment, Divergent Futures
Two islands, side by side off the Connemara coast, faced existential pressures in the mid-twentieth century. One – Inishark – was evacuated in 1960. The other – Inishbofin – remained inhabited. Sixty years later, Inishbofin is not only alive but socially and economically active, negotiating tourism, conservation, farming, ritual, and community life in all their messy interdependence. Inishark, by contrast, survives as memory, ruin, and periodic visitation.
What Island Endurance makes clear – without ever framing it as an argument – is that this divergence was not about cultural resilience or identity. It was about whether everyday life could still be lived. What differed was not character or attachment, but the degree to which access, infrastructure, and institutional support were maintained or allowed to erode.
Lash does not present these islands as moral opposites, nor does he frame one as failure and the other as success. By painting the image of them geographically side by side, Lash allows the reader to explore how different historical pathways emerge from how people are able – or unable – to work with the traces of the past in the present.
Drawing on archaeology, folklore, and ethnography, and grounded in fifteen years of fieldwork, Island Endurance reconstructs more than a millennium of creative engagement with heritage. Across three broad historical eras, islanders repeatedly encountered, altered, and reimagined what came before them: from pilgrimage traditions at monastic shrines, to the reuse of medieval monuments for local devotions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to the repurposing of ruins for managing livestock and guiding tourist trails in the twenty-first.
What emerges is not a story of preservation, but of use.
Heritage as Practice, Not Display
One of the book’s most consequential insights is its insistence that heritage is not something islands merely possess. It is something people do.
Lash attends closely to the sensory and other-than-human elements of island landscapes: quartz pebbles underfoot, picnics at holy wells, sheep farming, weather, tides, and seasonal rhythms. These details are not anecdotal. They shape how people experience place, time, and belonging. Heritage, in this account, is cultivated through shared tasks and embodied practice.
Islanders have continually adapted monuments, traditions, and landscapes to host collective experience, negotiate cooperation, and sustain livelihoods amid adversity. The illusion of timelessness, Lash shows, has always relied on this creativity. Freezing heritage at any one moment is not protection; it is rupture.
This matters because it exposes a persistent contemporary policy blind spot: the assumption that heritage can be safeguarded independently of the practices that make life possible. Recent work by organisations such as the Burrenbeo Trust demonstrates this clearly [https://burrenbeo.com/].
From Resilience to Temporal Responsibility
Here I mixed Lash’s work with that of Paolo Gruppuso and Andrew Whitehouse on Exploring Taskscapes [https://www.berghahnjournals.com/view/journals/saas/28/3/soca12789.xml]. Seen through a taskscape lens, placemaking moves beyond the language of ‘resilience’ (living in Connemara, that word is synonymous with State apathy and even neglect) and into a question of temporal responsibility. Rather than asking whether islands can bounce back from decline, this approach asks how planning decisions participate in the ongoingness of place – the continuous unfolding of life through interrelated human and more-than-human tasks. Living in a rural area valued by the State only in terms of tourism and how it can balance Ireland’s sustainability scoreboard, I have a vested and deeply personal interest in this question.
Temporality here is not linear history and not frozen heritage as we see through SACs and SPAs, but the accumulation of everyday practices over time: landing and maintaining access, adapting work to seasons, reusing structures, caring for land, animals, and memory. These practices are not incidental. They are the means through which places remain inhabitable.
Crucially, this makes clear that heritage and livelihood cannot be separated. Landscapes do not endure as scenery or artefact; they emerge through work. When policy attempts to protect nature or heritage by abstracting them from the practices that sustain life, it misunderstands what landscape is. As with rural Ireland, treating islands as museums to be visited only assumes land can persist independently of the tasks that shape it. The taskscape framework shows this to be false.
Planning therefore carries responsibility for whether essential tasks can continue and adapt, or are quietly foreclosed. It must enable continuity of work, allow livelihoods to evolve, and recognise that abandonment is not neutral – it leaves material, social, and ecological traces that shape future possibilities. From this perspective, island futures are not about resilience in the abstract, but about whether planning systems accept accountability for how places are allowed to endure, change, or be emptied. Rural and island depopulation and decline is not an inevitability; it is policy.
This divergence must also be understood in a wider historical context. During the mid-twentieth century, Irish government policy actively encouraged or facilitated the evacuation of several offshore island communities. It must be said that some communities sought this. In the 1950s and 1960s, islands from Kerry to Mayo and Donegal – including the Great Blasket (evacuated in 1953), East Skeam (1958), Inishark (1960), and the Inishkea Islands (largely emptied by the 1960s) – saw entire ways of life brought to an end. These evacuations were typically framed as pragmatic or humanitarian responses to isolation and risk, but they also reflect a period in which the state withdrew support for the taskscapes that made island life viable. This history matters because it shows that abandonment was not accidental: it was planned, managed, and normalised.
Island Endurance never argues that Inishark should have remained populated. The evacuation is presented as rational, even humane, given the risks and neglect involved. But by tracing Inishbofin’s continued adaptation alongside Inishark’s abandonment, the book (inadvertently?) exposes how policy, infrastructure, and investment decisions shape what choices are available.
Inishbofin survived not because it resisted change, but because change was possible. Fishing intersected with farming, then with tourism and conservation. Burial grounds were extended, paths redirected, rituals adapted. Heritage remained alive because people were still working, negotiating, and making a living.
Inishark became unviable not through inevitability, but through a series of cumulative decisions that removed the basic conditions required for living – including the failure to maintain safe landing infrastructure, the erosion and non-repair of piers, the increasing difficulty of access in poor weather, the withdrawal of essential services, and the absence of sustained investment that would have allowed everyday work, care, and burial practices to continue with dignity and safety.
Seen this way, enthusiasm for opportunities like the Great Blasket Island caretaker roles is not naïve romanticism. It is evidence that people are willing to engage in demanding, place-rooted lives if those lives are structurally supported rather than symbolically preserved. The question is not whether people are willing to live this way, but why policy continues to treat such willingness as exceptional rather than plan-worthy.
Placemaking Grounded in Taskscapes, Not Landscapes Without People
If Ireland is serious about rural futures, repopulation, and sustainable long-term viability – and I am not convinced that it is – placemaking must move beyond identity narratives and resilience rhetoric. It must be grounded in lived taskscapes. People are not parasitic on the land; they farm it, cultivate it, maintain it, and shape it over time. Rural landscapes are not static inheritances. They are the outcome of continuous human and more-than-human work.
As a placemaker, I am acutely aware that Ireland has repeatedly failed to honour its rural proofing commitments over recent decades. If meaningful rural proofing safeguards were in place, policy would begin with people rather than abstractions. It would ask practical questions: what tasks must be possible for life to continue?; what infrastructure quietly enables those tasks?; where policies privilege visitors, aesthetics, or regulatory simplicity over residents?; and how heritage frameworks could support liveable, working, sustainable rural futures rather than freezing places in time?
We have seen the consequences of getting this wrong. Early, well-intentioned environmental designations – including the introduction of EU Special Areas of Conservation in the early 1990s – often applied a blunt, one-size-fits-all approach that restricted traditional farming practices such as winter grazing. In places like the Burren, this did not protect the landscape; it damaged it. Under-grazing and abandonment led to scrub encroachment and the degradation of priority habitats, exposing a fundamental misunderstanding: that ecosystems could be conserved by removing people from the equation.
What has since emerged is a more mature and evidence-based understanding that landscapes depend on human stewardship. Organisations such as the Burrenbeo Trust and initiatives like the Burren Programme have demonstrated that farming and conservation are not opposing forces but interdependent ones. By supporting farmers to continue appropriate grazing, seasonal work, and land management, these programmes have improved biodiversity outcomes while sustaining livelihoods and local knowledge. The Burren has not endured because it was preserved as a museum, but because people were enabled to continue the tasks that made the landscape what it is.
I got to experience this first-hand as I helped walk the cattle home at the end of autumn, high up on the Burren, as part of the Winterage drive: https://caroltallon.com/walking-the-cattle-home-2025-burren-winterage-and-irelands-living-heritage/
This lesson is directly relevant to Ireland’s islands and rural peripheries. When policy separates nature from work, heritage from livelihood, and conservation from daily practice, it does not produce sustainability. It produces abandonment. When planning supports taskscapes – the ongoing work of living, farming, maintaining, caring, and adapting – places remain viable.
Placemaking, therefore, is not about curating rural Ireland for consumption. It is about accepting responsibility for the conditions under which life can continue. That means investing in infrastructure, enabling livelihoods, supporting stewardship, and recognising that people are not a threat to rural landscapes. They are the reason those landscapes exist at all.
Where livelihoods disappear, heritage becomes untenable as lived practice. Where livelihoods persist without regard for heritage, meaning and place are gradually eroded. Neither reflects the rural Ireland I believe is worth planning for. And rural futures require both – held together through planning, policy, and placemaking that understands life as something done, not displayed.
But this is not a call to return to the past, nor a denial of climate reality. It is an acknowledgement that living well with land and sea has always required adaptation, and that the environmental crises we now face demand better, more informed and attentive forms of stewardship – not the removal of people from landscapes, but their reintegration as responsible participants within them.
The land does not endure despite human presence. In many places, it endures because of it.
That brings us to a more difficult and necessary question. If we accept that climate action, biodiversity protection, and rural viability must be pursued together, how might Ireland’s uninhabited islands be made habitable again – carefully, selectively, and responsibly? Who might live there, and under what conditions? What forms of livelihood could sustain year-round life without repeating past mistakes? How has technology evolved – in renewable energy, communications, construction, and food systems – to make low-impact, off-grid, climate-appropriate living genuinely possible in Atlantic conditions?
These are not hypothetical questions. They sit at the intersection of housing, climate adaptation, rural policy, and social imagination. The future of how we live with land, water, and each other is being quietly tested at their edges. Rural planning has failed the people of rural Ireland for decades. But it’s not too late.
Let’s start the conversation… carol@caroltallon.com
*To be fair to the book author mentioned above, my views are not his. Similarly, the above essay is not a book review (I highly recommend this to rural placemakers – Amazon link: https://amzn.to/4psKdbD), but rather it got me thinking about how knowledge, building methods and technology have evolved to potentially make habitable islands evacuated since the 1950s. I also used the following academic paper for contemporary context: Gruppuso, P. and Whitehouse, A. (2020) ‘Exploring taskscapes: an introduction’, Social Anthropology, 28, pp. 588–597. https://doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12789
