Knitting skills were an everyday part of island life. All along the western seaboard of Ireland, but notably in Donegal, hand knitting (first introduced to Ireland in the seventeenth century), weaving and other homeskills were encouraged in the latter half of the nineteenth century by Victorian philanthropists as income earners in poor and destitute rural communities. The Congested Districts Board, a government body set up in 1893 to combat poverty in heavily populated rural areas, founded 76 lacemaking, knitting and crochet schools as well as establishlng flshing industries designed to improve overall living standards.

In Donegal, knitting became the mainstay of nearly every family and, according to John Molloy of Ardara, whose family business goes back to 1900, "one of the home crafts that kept the smoke going up the chimney".

In the Aran Islands, hoever, as Major Rutledge Fair reported in 1893, "nothing woven or spun is ever sold". The women were certainly knitting socks, but only for their families, an activity that took up a lot of their time. These socks would have been made "in the round" on three or four needles after the wool had been carded, spun and dyed, a technique that required certain competence and experience Possibly the earliest pictorial evidence of intricate white knitting comes from a film made before "Man of Aran" by the Catholic Film Society in 1932 on Inishmore to coincide with the Eucharstic Conference in Tuam. In one sequence taken inside the church in Kilronan, a group of children, girls and boys, are dressed in their first Holy Communion regalia. Several little boys can be seen wearing patterned white sweaters with little collars and buttons along the shoulders. One appears to be made completely in basket stitch with a moss stitch collar, prefiguring some of the later, larger garments.

The Abbey Theatre actress, Rita Mooney, in an account of her visit to the islands in 1930 wrote "at that time the children of Aran would wear their sweaters to Mass on Sunday, each familly having its own traditional, individual design and all in spotless gleaming white". One old man, now in his 80s, still fondly remembers his white first communion gansey.

So the Aran sweater, as we know it, started to emerge between 1900 and the late 1920s. New techniques, new stitches and a mode of experimentation developed on the islands during this period that transformed a fairly routine operation into a craft of singular beauty and artistic expression. Once experienced knitters could see the possibilities of patterning with no conventional forms to copy, there was no holding them back. The difference between Aran sweaters with their vertical panels of pattern and the many other fine examples of fishing ganseys from around England and Scotland of the time is the sheer exuberance of the Irish design. Like musical notation, once the knitters knew the notes and chords, they could make their own arrangements, compose their own music. The native feeling for decoration in dress had found another expression. The new mode was slowly adopted.

There are various explanations as to how this happened. The Congested Districts Board's facilities to improve the fishing industry on the islands brought fishermen there from Scotland, Donegal and the Channel Islands and other places for the fishing season. Their wives would come with them to fillet the fish. There would have been many opportunities to see and copy the traditional cabled sweaters of the arrivals from other coastal communities. And the technique of cabling, involving the use of a third needle, would have opened up possibilities of other "relief" or raised stitches. Donegal women would certainly have been familiar with Fair Isle and sources of knitting yarn other than the native oiled wools.

Returned emigrants would have brought back new ideas too; Aran islanders traditionally emigrated to Boston. One woman, Mary Dympna Dirrane of Inishmore, in a letter to Kitty Joyce in the 1950s, claimed that her mother Margaret had gone to America in 1906 and, inspired by the fishermen's navy blue shop jerseys she had seen there, had knitted one on her return home for her brother in basket stitch and then another in diamonds. "And from then on she copied branches and plants growing around the island." To Rohana Darlington, author of Irish Knitting, she said that her mother had been taught various stitches by immigrant women on some islands off Boston.

That Margaret Dirrane was a highly inventive knitter there can be no doubt. In 1946 she was considered one of the three best in the Aran Islands. She supplied knitwear to Cleo, a Dublin shop, and some time in the 1950s threw into one of the white flourbags in which her goods were always sent, a little hat which combined three techniques in one garment: knitting, crochet and weaving. This colourful "crios hat" as it became known, is still being sold today.

Aran knitting must also be seen in the context of the overall encouragement of home skills at the turn of the century. Anthropologist John C. Messenger's Inis Beag, using information collected in the 1950s on Inisheer, claims that instructors were sent in the 1890s from the Congested Districts Board "to teach the women the manner of knitting the intricate patterns". Messenger also refers to the fact that "only children wear the gansey for men have always preferred a dark sweater of simple design. The patterns bear such euphonious names as crooked road, figure eight, double diamond, rosebud, honeycomb and blackberry and most of them are common to the rest of Ireland, the British Isles and other parts of Europe". Knitting was, above all, a communal activity, a pastime that brought together the young girls and women of the islands and an everyday skill that was passed down from one generation to the next along the female line. Patterns were never written down and any new discovery was quickly copied and stored away in the collective memory. Some knitters were more creative and quicker than others. One woman on Inishmore remembers in the 1 930s when she was a little girl that "we used to go to Mass on Sunday, God forgive me, not to say our prayers, but to stare at the stiches - and then we'd rush home to try and copy them ourselves " . Another knitter, Bridgie Mullen, recalls how the girls from the village would come and knit together by the oil lamp hanging from the chimney and her father would read to them.