Faith, football and frescos

The Pirate Queen sets off into calm waters, under the shadow of Croagh Patrick, towards the home of Grace O'Malley. It's not O'Malley that today's group of tourists are looking for, though. Lurching about the lolling ferry in tweeds and macs is an eclectic group of academics. Dawson Street's Royal Irish Academy is venturing out to Clare Island, for a book launch.

The Academy first ventured onto Clare Island, off the coast of Mayo, in 1901. Ten years later, it had completed the most comprehensive natural history survey ever undertaken in Ireland, and the first major biological survey of a specific area carried out in the world.

(The 1911 survey was led by Robert Lloyd Praeger, and those academics visiting the island then and since became known to the islanders as "Praegers". People tell us, at first, that the name is still used, but later the islanders scoff at this romanticism.)

Amongst the treasures the survey documented was a small medieval Cistercian abbey (so small, in fact, that technically it was likely not an abbey, but a "cell", an outpost of Knockmoy abbey in Galway).

Beside the island's parish church, and just above the post office, the abbey stands a mile or so from the harbour on the southern side of the island, with views across the strait to the Twelve Bens and Croagh Patrick. Small and inobstrusive, there seems little to set it apart from any other ruined church littering the Irish landscape.

Until you go inside. In the chancel of the abbey, around and above a tomb that legend claims as the resting place of Grainne Mhaol, the walls and roof are covered in paintings. It's not the Sistine Chapel – the images are badly faded and mostly monochrome – but these wall paintings are unique, for their age (as much as 600 year old, perhaps), for their location and for their curious content.

"The images seem to occupy a space somewhere between the secular and religious and between the real and imaginary worlds," explains Karena Morton, one of the conservators.

Eighty years or so after the paintings were first documented in the 1911 survey of Clare Island, Christoph Oldenbourg arrived at the abbey to start a conservation project. He found the whole centre of the frescoed ceiling simply hanging away from the roof, ready for a gust of wind or heavy rainfall to collapse. The first thing he did was to take two large washers and gently fix the loose–hanging plaster back to the roof.

That was in 1991. He's given over a decade of his life to the abbey since, to staring at the walls and ceiling and painstakingly clearing and cleaning the artwork. The fruits of this work have been documented in the publication of volume four of The New Survey of Clare Island, dedicated to the abbey.

"Stand here, let yourself see," says Oldenbourg. We crane our necks. The roof curves away from us, patches of plaster partially covering bare stone, light red stains and scars across it.

"The seeing of it is always the most important thing, in a church context", he says. The paintings were "not just to prettify something, (but) to look at, to meditate".

He shows us how to look for "the fragments". With a laser pointer, he traces the line of a vein of red across inches of the plaster, then a larger stain, then a wider area.

"The red blob here is actually a falcon." Gently, a falcon spreads its wings across the ceiling, released from how many hundreds of years of weather–beaten obscurity.

"And cut off here is the hand that released the falcon."

Slowly, we gaze across the ceiling, straining to follow the laser pointer, listening as Oldenbourg tells of the epic discoveries of a church conservationist in a 600–year–old mini–abbey on Clare Island. Hunting lords on horseback, hounds and falcons, arrow–smitten stags, in elegant, thin lines of red paint, chase across the ceiling of this church.

For the launch of the book, the Academy has invited the Cistercian monks of Roscrea to the abbey, and the small crowd crammed into the abbey goes still as the four who have made the journey start to sing simple, solemn and beautiful chants, as old, and older, than the abbey itself. They finish with Salve Regina, the Cistercians' hymn to Mary, and the song that completes their final office of each day. "It would have been sung in the abbey every night", Brother Richard explains. It is an emotional occasion for them, he says. "When you think that, for at least 200 years, there were monks present on this island, it's a real link with the past." The medieval monks of Clare Island would have sung "pretty much the same music" and lived in essentially the same way, he says.

Richard and his colleagues don't hang around – they left Roscrea at 7am (after sung offices at 4 am and 6.30) and are due back the same night. One of the three vows they take is of "stability": a day trip like this, for them, is "quite exceptional" (and another vow is obedience to the abbot).

There's been the occasional religious service held in the abbey in recent years, but it's the next door parish church that handles the weekly services.

A brash yellow on the outside, but small and intimate inside, the church is filled on Sunday morning as three children make their First Holy Communion. It's a rare opportunity for the islanders to attend mass on a Sunday. A team of eight priests in Westport work an islands rota, and Clare Island just sees a priest from Friday evening to Saturday morning, three weekends in four. (The islanders were offered a Sunday evening/Monday morning slot, but that wouldn't have allowed for the students, who leave the island on the Sunday evening, to get mass.)

A parish council of lay people manages church affairs on the island, and oversees at a weekend service the week when the priest isn't over. The priest consecrates enough hosts in advance for the following week's Communion.

Micheál Mannion is the priest who manages the rota from Westport and is here for the First Holy Communion. "It's a lovely break from Westport, more peaceful, quieter," he says.

The rota was introduced a couple of years back, because the diocese couldn't spare the island a full–time priest. "It was a huge change for them," says Mannion. "There was a bit of disappointment there, but we explained to them, this is the way it'll be going, more and more there'll be fewer priests, more and more, people like themselves taking responsibility to lead services."

"You can see it negatively and get bogged down, or you can look at it positively, it's an opportunity for the ordinary people to get involved. (Apart from the sacraments) a lay person can do practically everything else." There's a parish council now to look after things, with five islanders on it – three of them married, one only 20 years old.

There is a noticeboard just inside the church, with an A4 poster title Tsunami Appeal. Clare Island gave €605, it says, Turk Island €538.

Mannion is helped in the service by an enthusiastic pianist playing an electric keyboard, a regular accompanist at the island's services the last four years or so. George Zengel first came to the island in 1974, and till 1991 visited every year, staying in a tent. He is a German Lutheran minister, and before his religious career, was a jazz musician. Is he integrated into the island life? "Yes of course," he replies, gruffly, then pauses. "It took time." He bought a cottage here in 1991, the first foreigner to buy on the island, he says, "At that time they didn't even sell to Dubliners". The islanders were scared of the consequences, but Paddy Flynn, whose house he was buying, "Spent two days phoning everybody on the island, and they all agreed".

The island isn't at all an unfriendly place. In fact, it's surprisingly cosmopolitan. The accents in the pub at night are from across Ireland and Europe, and it's not at first obvious who's local and who's not. There seems to be a healthy subset of the tourist industry in long–time repeat visitors, and there are people moving to the island to work in niche tourist areas, like Ciara Cullen and Christophe Mouze, who run a B&B, restaurant and yoga retreat centre.

There's a couple who've been coming every year since the 1970s, and know the youngsters by their surnames and family features ("Is that the young O'Malley?"); a few women who married islanders and who've kept coming back even though the marriages didn't work out; and a Swedish travelling musician who leads a rousing session later that night.

The pub is in the island's Bay View hotel, a name which may seem bland, but which is stunningly literal. The hotel perches above the small harbour on the east side of the island, peering across to Croagh Patrick and the Mayo coastline. The hotel was built in the early 1960s by Chris O'Grady, the island's leading entrepreneur.

O'Grady's father ran the mail boat service to the island (as did his father before him), and but for that, he'd have emigrated.

"You'd get depresed watching all the young people take off," he says, "But it was my lot to take it over". Finding himself steadily ferrying more tourists than mail, he spotted the potential for tourism on the island, and built the hotel.

Now, many of the houses have extra rooms built on, and do B&B. We stay in a newly–built eight–bed cottage, high up the hill above the bay.

An old flyer on the sideboard in the house advertises an island fundraiser. "The amazing Oliver O'Malley will attempt to drive his tractor with trailor in reverse from Toremore to the Quay. Sponsor a line and guess the time to win a prize!"

On Sunday afternoon, there's a football match on a shiny green pitch carved out of the hillside. The supporters shout for Clare Island, then correct themselves, and shout for Na hOileann. It's an inter–island team, playing the Kilmovee Shamrocks from the mainland in the Mayo league division five.

Na hOileann are strong, and keen, but they look a bit rusty. "Training as a unit doesn't really happen at all," says club secretary Padraig O'Malley. "It's awkward to organise, cause we've lads living on Inishturk, and Inishboffin, and working on the mainland also."

But there's a strong tradition of football on Clare, he says, "at one stage the Louisbourg team was backboned with Clare Island men".

After the match, I cycle the length and breath of the island, uphill from the harbour, past the yoga centre and north to the lighthouse looking onto Achill and back over the pass between the peaks of Knockmore and Knockaveen and out to the other end and the ruined signal tower looking out to the Atlantic and down towards Connemara.

This is to capture what is must have been like to cycle anywhere in the west twenty, thirty, forty years ago. Maybe one car passes. The odd fellow tourist, on bike or in walking boots.

On Monday morning, we make for the ferry – as they say on the island, we're "going out". We've kept our rented bikes a day extra, and leave them inside the open, untended shop and volunteer the extra rental to a neighbour. A clutch of straggling academics are on the ferry, and some of the island's weekend residents, the young people who have to leave each week for secondary school and college.

Aisling O'Malley did her time of island commuting, and now lives in Westport. Brought up on the island, her father was born and still lives there, her mother married onto the island from Lucan, but has since left again. O'Malley is hoping to start a masters degree in coastal management in Cork in September. She agrees the island is idyllic, "I wouldn't have wanted to be anywhere else in the world growing up.

"I don't know if it's an attitude we're brought up with, or what, but it's always there, that you know there's very little opportunity to settle on Clare Island, to go back there to settle.

"Once you leave at 13, and the more education you get and the further you go, the less chance there is of ever moving back."

Yet some do move back, lured by the promise of jobs in tourism or fish–farming. One island lad moved back from England to work on the fish farm, and brought his English girlfriend with him. Her two brothers came to visit. Now there are three Fleetwood siblings married to islanders and living on the island, and another generation of cosmopolitan Clare Island folk in the offing.

The abbey wall paintings, the faith and the football have survived this far. They'll weather a few more storms yet.

?More www.anu.ie/clareisland,

www.ria.ie/projects/clare_island

yogaholidays.net/clare

The New Survey of Clare Island Volume 4: The Abbey is available from the Royal Irish Academy and can be bought online at www.ria.ie or by phone at (01) 676 2570

For more information on The New Survey of Clare Island see: www.ria.ie/projects/clare_island