Hare Island: The Twentieth century

Hare Island

Postcard of Hare Island, Lough Ree

Hare Island

Hare Island

Postcard of Hare Island, Lough Ree

Enlarge image

Throughout the twentieth century members of the Duffy family have lived on and farmed Hare Island.

They made short term lettings of Hare Island as a summer home to a number of people. Among those to rent the property were Sean MacBride S.C., later a Nobel and Lenin peace prize recipient. Mr mc Bride and his family spent many a happy summer having Hare Island as a base for their boating activities on Lough Ree.

Among those who visited Hare Island in the company of Harry Rice whose daughter Betty Williams had the use of Hare Lodge were the novelist L.A.G. Strong who spent an evening enthralled by his story-telling and was later to use a story related by Rice as the basis for a novel The Light above the lake which was published by Methuen in 1958.

Another distinguished visitor was Heinrich Boll, Nobel prize-winner for literature who in his book Irsches Tegebuch (Irish Journal) has a chapter dealing with his visit to Hare Island. His diary recaptures highlights of visits which he made to Ireland in 1954 and '55. His reason for visiting Hare Island was to record on colour film a brief cameo of an old islander, one of the Duffys, who was then eighty-eight old.