Great Blasket Island caretaker scheme: ‘We didn’t expect anyone to willingly come to an island with no hot water or electricity for months’
The Great Blasket Island Experience has brought visitors and wildlife back into the Co Kerry island with the help of annual caretakers and a flock of sheep
Billy O'Connor and Alice Hayes with their children
The once abandoned Great Blasket island off Co Kerry is slowly coming back to life. Billy O’Connor, whose family bought land on the island decades ago, and his partner Alice Hayes set up the The Great Blasket Island Experience in 2014 in an attempt to usher visitors back into the island.
A part of making the island habitable again has meant inviting caretakers to live and work on the island, building walkable paths and grazing the overgrown grass with over 300 sheep that they brought over from the mainland.
