Nothing says 'escape' like a break on a small Irish island, each with a strong personality different from the others. Some days you feel like you can touch with one hand, remote and unattainable the next day. Yet almost always, a handful of men, monks, fishermen, or pirates, tried to live there and often succeeded. Thus over the centuries, these communities, often forced to rely only on their strength, have built a solid and unique identity, each with its history, where an Ireland still lives elsewhere hopelessly disappeared. Three are fascinating handkerchiefs of land in a large bay between Mayo and Galway counties. They can find a quiet Irish life on the sea, capable of striking at the heart and revealing different but fascinating stories. The microscopic Inishbofin off the coast of Connemara is small heaven with its quiet bays and a dark castle built by Cromwell as a prison for the Irish irreducible. Just north, Tory Island, Ireland's most remote island off Donegal, is the Gaelic world's icon island. Clare Island, where weather may change from deep fog to nearly tropical light, was also the chieftain Granuaille O'Malley's small kingdom (1530-1600 a.D.), Grainne Nì Mhàille in Gaelic, one of the most celebrated pirate women of history. She was a reputed chieftain of a fleet that controlled Atlantic routes off the island. Continuously en route with the British, one fine day, he climbed up the Thames aboard a prison and appeared at Elizabeth's court, claiming to treat "among queens" on an equal footing to direct their disputes. Achill Island, the biggest of the small Irish islands, has some beautiful cliffs and beaches reflecting a dramatic landscape of cliffs. Tory Island, the most remote Irish island with less than two hundred inhabitants, is a handkerchief of land often isolated from storms, where a hundred people live. You arrive only with small boats through a perpetually stormy arm of the sea. Here Gaelic is still spoken, and Tory has always been a topos of Irish music and folklore. A story tells their character well. In 1884 the English gunboat Wasp was shipwrecked because, according to tradition, the inhabitants turned three times around the ancient Stone of Desires "which realized their dreams. Even if no one says it, the truth is that someone turned off the lighthouse at the right time to sink the ship that arrived to expel the inhabitants who had not paid the tributes. So Her Majesty's government, after losing 52 sailors, probably decided it was better to let it go. Since then, the connections are safer today, but when the light of the lighthouse, which does not go out even during the day, slides on the bog, the disturbing peat desert, only the screech of seabirds breaks a silence so absolute that it seems to have left behind the world of men.