An accomplished landscape and travel photographer from Ring in Co Waterford, Sibéal Turraoin and her aunt, the musician Máire Breathnach, from Dungarvan, were the first Irish women to navigate through the Northwestern Passage to Alaska in 2010. When another sailing voyage to Greenland was thwarted due to problems with the boat, Turraoin decided to take a hiking trip to Iceland and stay for the winter.
“And then, sure I’ll stay for the summer and then make that a year – and I am still here eight years later,” she says with a laugh.
A kindergarten teacher working in a small country school in Borg, about an hour’s drive from the capital Reykjavik, she explains that, although she still works as a photographer, “you need a day job as well, as Iceland is expensive”.
She is one of three teachers in the school with 10 children aged from two to three years in her care. “We try to mix them [with other classes] because the small ones learn more from the bigger ones.”
She now speaks Icelandic. “It’s a hard language and though I did an eight-week course, I am mostly self-taught and can stand up for myself now on a daily basis. The grammar is quite complicated and for every noun there are 16 different cases.
“In English ‘I have a bag’ translates in Icelandic as ‘I am with a bag’,” she explains, adding that “most Icelanders speak English, but they are very protective of their language – the children have fluent English from watching YouTube and Netflix on TV”.
Turraoin lives near the school in a tiny house called the Black Cottage “in the middle of a bog. You can’t see the house from the road. Public transport is awful, so you have to drive – there is no other choice. There are only two buses daily to the nearby village. There is a similar housing crisis as in Ireland and prices are astronomical.”
It was at a traditional feast called Svidaveisla (known as the Sheep’s Head Party), held in a stable to which she was invited by a friend, that she fell into conversation with a local “and we started talking about helicopters” she recalls.
That was seven years ago, “so he is the reason I am staying. It’s all his fault”, she says of her partner Oskar Palmarsson, an aircraft engineer.
Winters in Iceland are tough and a recent storm closed the school – the snow can be hardly noticeable but then huge drifts “can block the door and you can’t go outside and when it is so dark and so windy, you can feel as if you are in a never-ending nightmare”.
Summers, on the other hand, are so bright that, in June, there is no discernible night “so it is bright at three in the morning as in the middle of the day”.
Power is 40 times cheaper than in Ireland. Turraoin has free electricity because Oskar’s family have a waterfall that generates electricity for three houses “and we have the immersion on all day”, she says.
Houses tend to be built together “and there are not so many one-offs as in Ireland”.
There is a lot of freedom here and things are very informal and there are no class levels
— Sibéal Turraoin
Food, clothing and books are very expensive – a basic paperback can cost €40 and a T-shirt €20 and more. Basic car parts are expensive too because of import taxes on everything. Even receiving post from abroad is subject to tax. Many Icelanders go to Glasgow on shopping trips, particularly around Christmas.
Traditional Icelandic fare includes a lot of boiled fish, fermented shark, puffin, whale (commercial whaling has resumed after an absence of years) and salmon as well as sheep meat.
“The shark is buried in the ground for three months and must be eaten outside as the smell is so strong. And they eat every bit of the sheep and slatur is like black and white pudding but made with lamb,” she explains, confessing that she hates fish.
Local foods she loves include saltkjot (salt lamb), roast lamb, rugbraud (dark sweet rye bread) and laufabraud (very thin deep fried Christmas bread in which patterns are cut) and kjotsupa (lamb soup like an Irish stew). Sheep are rounded up with quad bikes or horses which are descended from the original ones brought by the Vikings, one of the purest breeds in the world. Any that are exported are not allowed return, to protect the horse population’s genetic purity.
Though most sheep farmers are hobby farmers, there is, she says, no money in sheep and wool is quite cheap. A lot of women knit “including me” – in particular, the lopapeysa, a traditional thick Icelandic geansaí, warm and almost waterproof, that doesn’t need to be washed.
“Other than knitting and some woodcarving, there is not a huge diversity of craft.”
So what does she most like about living in Iceland? “There is a lot of freedom here and things are very informal and there are no class levels. On weekends, I do a lot of hiking, sometimes horse riding, but with one exception I haven’t gone sailing.”
What once awed her about the landscape, she now takes for granted, she says.
“It’s kind of strange when you live somewhere else for a length of time, you get changed by it. When I come home, I am quite Scandinavian and quieter. I lived for 10 years in Dublin and can’t imagine going back and when I do come back to Ireland, it is to home in the Gaeltacht in Ring.
“Here when I look out one window, I can see three volcanoes and on the other, one known as the Gateway to Hell – but it’s far away. In the summer, in hot tubs, you get those lovely views. I can’t get them in Ireland.”
