Editing Peig Sayers (section)

===''Peig''===
[[File:peig_sayers_headstone.jpg|thumb|upright|Headstone of Peig Sayers]]
''Peig'' is among the most famous expressions of a late [[Gaelic Revival]] genre of personal histories by and about inhabitants of the Blasket Islands and other remote Gaeltacht locations. [[Tomás Ó Criomhthain]]'s similarly censored memoir {{lang|ga|an tOileánach}} ("the Islandman", 1929) and [[Muiris Ó Súilleabháin]]'s {{lang|ga|Fiche Bliain ag Fás}}, and [[Robert J. Flaherty]]'s documentary film ''[[Man of Aran]]'' address similar subjects.

The often bleak tone of the book is established from its opening words:

{{cquote|"I am an old woman now, with one foot in the grave and the other on its edge. I have experienced much ease and much hardship from the day I was born until this very day. Had I known in advance half, or even one-third, of what the future had in store for me, my heart wouldn't have been as gay or as courageous as it was in the beginning of my days."
}}

Ironically, the standard cliches of Peig's memoirs and those censored similarly to hers swiftly found themselves the object of contempt and mockery – especially among the cosmopolitan middle class [[intelligentsia]] and the often covertly literary [[Civil Service of the Republic of Ireland|Irish civil service]] – for their often extremely depressing accounts of rural poverty, starvation, family tragedies, and bereavements. In [[Modern literature in Irish]], mockery of the Gaeltacht memoir genre reached its peak with [[Flann O'Brien]]'s parody of {{lang|ga|An tOileánach}}; the novel {{lang|ga|[[An Béal Bocht]]}} ("The Poor Mouth").

Despite this fact, Peig's book was widely used as a text for teaching and examining Irish in many secondary schools. As a book with arguably sombre and depressing themes and its latter half cataloguing a string of heartbreaking family tragedies, its presence on the Irish syllabus has often been harshly criticised.

It led, for example, to the following comment from [[Progressive Democrats|Progressive Democrat]] Seanadóir [[John Minihan (politician)|John Minihan]] in the [[Seanad Éireann]] in 2006 when discussing improvements to the curriculum:

{{cquote|"No matter what our personal view of the book might be, there is a sense that one has only to mention the name Peig Sayers to a certain age group and one will see a dramatic rolling of the eyes, or worse."|20px|20xp|[[Seanad Éireann]] – Volume 183 – 5 April 2006<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/seanad/2006-04-05/speech/131/|title=Irish language: Motion |first=Houses of the|last=Oireachtas|date=5 April 2006|website=www.oireachtas.ie}}</ref>
}}

According to Blasket Islands literary scholar Cole Moreton, however, this was not Peig's fault, but that of her censors, "Some of her stories were very funny, some savage, some wise, some earthy; but very few made it into the pages of her autobiography. The words were dictated to her son, then edited by the wife of a Dublin school inspector, and both collaborators sanitized the text a little in turn so that it was homely and pious, a book fit to be taken up as a set text in Irish schools. The image of Peig's broad face smiling out from beneath a headscarf, hands clasped in her lap, became familiar to generations of schoolchildren who were bored rigid by this holy peasant woman who had been forced upon them. They grew up loathing Peig... without hearing the stories as they were intended."<ref name="Marcus Tanner 2004 Pages 102-103"/>

''Peig'' was eventually replaced by [[Maidhc Dainín Ó Sé]]'s ''A Thig Ná Tit Orm'' during the mid-1990s.