Island Diary.

As the season of appreciation for our loved ones commences, we are delighted to share a recent cause for family celebration – a recognition of Lifetime Achievement for Tarlach and Áine de Blacam at the Made in Ireland Awards recently. Tarlach and Áine founded Inis Meáin Knitting Company in 1976 to provide employment in Áine’s homeplace, the Aran Island of Inis Meáin. Creating a company on a small off-shore island with no running water or electricity and minimal transport at the time was extremely challenging, however they persevered and in 2023 handed over management to their son and daughter-in-law, Ruairí and Marie-Thérèse de Blacam. We are very grateful to them for their hard work and tenacity and are proud to share their life-journey so far with Inis Meáin Knitting Company as featured in this month’s issue of The Irish Country Magazine here.

With a population of 200 on the Aran Island of Inis Meáin, Tarlach and Áine de Blacam and their team employ 21 of these people. By creating jobs and sourcing electricity and running water for the island, Tarlach and Áine (our 2024 Irish Made Awards Lifetime Achievement winner) created a whole new lease of life for the next generation and beyond. Not only do they create beautiful garments but their sense of community is incredibly inspiring.

Tell us a little about the early days; you didn’t necessarily grow up on Inis Meáin speaking Irish.
I went to Trinity college to study Law and discovered that  you had to take a language with the bar, and I had always been interested in Irish. I was particularly interested in Trinity because the professor there was Máirtín Ó Cadhain, probably the most important writer in modern Irish. I then switched from Law to Celtic languages. My parents weren’t very impressed! But off I went to the Gaeltacht to learn to speak Irish in Inis Meáin on the Aran Islands.

You met your wife Áine in Dublin, but she was originally from Inis Meáin herself. How did your paths cross?
I knew Áine’s brother before I knew her, and I was in touch with a lot of Irish-speaking people in Dublin; we used to meet in Irish-speaking pubs. We had an 18-month romance and got married. I was the one really who wanted to move to the west, and she agreed. So, we moved here in 1973. The island was quite different then. No electricity, no running water. The ferry that came from Galway had to be accessed only by rowing out to it. It was pretty difficult conditions to be working in.

What were your plans for life on this beautiful, yet remote island?
I was originally going to start writing. But I got involved immediately in community development on the island. Over a period of 10 years, I worked as a manager of the community development cooperative. We installed running water and electricity. One of the things people wanted on the island at that time was employment for young women. We were giving a lot of employment to young men working in construction projects. So, the idea of a knitwear business, one of the few local natural resources, was that youngsters could learn knitting. The goal was to keep more people in work on the island and so less people felt the need to move to the mainland.

How did you navigate stepping into this world of design and fashion?
We employed a consultant designer named Geraldine Clarke, who gave us a lot of help. She came and worked with us for several seasons. We learnt a lot from her in terms of sourcing yarns. There were lots of local spinners that supplied to us; in Donegal, in Mayo, in Cork and two in Northern Ireland supplying linen. Unfortunately, by the end of the century, there were none of these local spinners left. They were gradually closing down. The industry in Ireland got decimated over the years, ending up with The Celtic Tiger. So, we started sourcing more and more in Italy and South America for the likes of baby alpaca and silk. These fabrics all show at the international yarn fair in Florence, and so we attended those multiple times to sample. It was a huge learning curve because designing a new collection every six months is hugely draining and takes an awful lot of resources and we made a lot of mistakes along the way. Obviously, we learned from those mistakes and moved on!

You experienced huge international success even in the very early days of the business. Tell us a little about how this came about?
In the early days, Ireland was not an affluent society, so the number of people who could afford to buy high-value, top-quality knitwear and invest in it were limited. We aimed to export from day one. I’ll never forget the week I went to New York in 1986 with a suitcase full of samples. I had Irish linen with me; not many people knit linen because it is a very difficult yarn to knit. It’s not as forgiving as wool at all. It doesn’t break – it will break a needle before it breaks itself. So, we were unique with that, particularly in New York. I met with Barney Pressman at Barneys in New York on Seventh Avenue. He bought straight away, along with Louis Boston, another iconic store at the time.

What is your take on the design and craft industry in Ireland today?
I believe that young people want to do a lot more than sit in front of a computer for the rest of their lives. There is a huge number of crafts people who want to use their hands. Something that does give me some optimism is the work that we do here at Inis Meáin with our youngsters from The University of Ulster. Because of how small we are, they get an exposure to all areas of the industry. If you went to a brand in Italy for example, there would be one factory doing the knitting, another one putting the garments together, and another factory finishing and packing. More often than not, sales and marketing are in a different location altogether. But you get all of this under one roof in our building here on the island.

Ireland was once the most valued country when it came to exporting linen in particular. What are your thoughts on how this has changed?
On one of my early trips to Japan, I produced linen for the first time at an exhibition and this guy said “Wow, Irish linen, the best linen in the world.” I didn’t realise that Ireland is known worldwide for one of the best-quality linens. There are hugely inferior qualities of linens out there, particularly Chinese linen that’s called Ramie. They don’t have the climate to grow flax that we have in Ireland. Flax needs a lot of rain. I tell the students that come and intern with us; this was a hugely important industry and it is a resource that we should be using. I am hugely encouraged by the youngsters that come in.