National Heritage Week celebrated Ireland’s cultural, built and natural heritage, and encourages individuals and communities not just to enjoy the living landscape but to seek out new and innovative ways of exploring little-known sources of heritage interest and perhaps even discover new or long-forgotten ones.
A good example is the Old Ireland in Colour (Merrion Press) books, published by my former University of Galway colleagues, John Breslin and Sarah-Anne Buckley. They combined the resources of the National Library and other photographic collections, such as the Lawrence Collection, with state-of-the-art computer-assisted colourisation technology to produce striking new perspectives on older black-and-white images of Ireland.
The public passed their own verdict: the books were top of the best-seller lists for weeks. John applied the same colourisation techniques to an old sepia photograph of my grandmother that I then used as the cover-illustration on one of my own publications: The Songs of Elizabeth Cronin, Irish Traditional Singer (Four Courts Press). In a similar way to Old Ireland in Colour, that book brought back into focus some almost forgotten songs that were once well known, such as On Board the Kangaroo – made famous by the great Christy Moore’s Planxty version, The Good Ship Kangaroo.
The book, plus two CDs, followed in the footsteps of London-born and bred A Martin Freeman whose famous Ballyvourney Collection of 172 songs, gathered in 1913 and 1914 and published in 1920/1921, set the standard for all such folk-song collecting, in Ireland and in England.
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Freeman quoted his Baile Mhúirne informants as marvelling at how he had “saved things from the smoke” by his timely recording of the songs. His papers – long given up as lost – were only recently “saved from the smoke” by Nicholas Carolan, former director of the magnificent Irish Traditional Music Archive (ITMA).
When The Songs of Elizabeth Cronin was launched in Coolea, Co Cork, in 2000 a local schoolteacher, Seán Ó Muimhneacháin, came up to me afterwards and presented me with an old school copybook in which were eight previously unseen songs of Bess Cronin’s, written in her own hand, that had somehow survived in his family. They too had been miraculously “saved from the smoke”. The local community delight at the rediscovery is clear in the TG4 Molscéal documentary Banríon na nAmhrán
But perhaps the most spectacular discovery of its kind was the collection of Irish-language songs that were noted down on Inishmore in the Aran Islands in 1857 by a delegation of Irish antiquaries, led by the redoubtable George Petrie. Long since given up for lost, the words of all the songs turned up in – of all places – the University Library in Leipzig in 2011.
Mention of a school copybook above brings to mind one of the most remarkable untapped sources for the kinds of traditions that Heritage Week is all about: the famous “Schools Collection” of 1937-38 compiled by the Irish Folklore Commission (IFC), Coimisiún Bhéaloideas Éireann, which surveyed almost every primary school in Ireland regarding the customs and practices that were almost gone and forgotten but that lingered still in the memories of the children’s parents and grandparents.
The Schools Collection, some 1,100 copybooks, is especially important because it covered many areas of life where little or no collecting had been done by the main IFC collectors, including my uncle, Seán Ó Cróinín, full-time collector for Co Cork in the years 1939-1965.
Back in 2017 a beautifully produced booklet about lost Donegal folklore customs was published by Eithne Ní Ghallchobhair. Its superb choice of illustrations is a brilliant example of what can be done with the schools material. Given the countrywide coverage of the original scheme, it is clear that its riches are still largely untapped for other counties and they offer huge potential to community groups everywhere to discover things about their own localities all over Ireland. Copies may be lurking on bookshelves and attics throughout the land.
The Schools Collection is, however, only the tip of the iceberg as far as the Folklore Commission is concerned. The principal archive, now housed in the National Folklore Collection in UCD – 1,735 thick volumes comprising more than two million pages of material in both Irish and English – offers endless opportunities for discovery to interested local enthusiasts. It will open the minds of those curious about the lives that their elders lived and the songs, stories, poems and prayers that they recited to each other to while away the evenings long before the advent of the movie, streaming or TV.
The meticulous IFC record of farming practices also helps to put flesh on the bare bones that are provided by the fabulous array of farming implements and machinery that is on display in the National Museum of Country Life at Turloughmore, near Castlebar.
If you have anything of merit you can contact The National Museum of Ireland whose own website, Irish Community Archive Network (iCAN), is dedicated to “documenting and sharing our history and heritage online” by encouraging communities to record and preserve the traditions and practices of their respective areas.
With the Heritage Council now as a funding partner, it has supported the creation of 33 online community archives to date in counties Clare, Cork, Galway, Mayo and Wicklow, with three more archives in development.
In 1996 the University of Galway acquired the magnificent collection of sound recordings and photographs made in Ireland in 1952 by the American couple Jean Ritchie and George Pickow. Jean was a famous folk singer in her native USA.
The sound recordings were of the leading traditional singers and musicians of the time including Elizabeth Cronin, Seamus Ennis, Sarah Makem and Leo Rowsome – and many more – while George Pickow’s photographs are a unique record of an Ireland that was on the cusp of modernity.
The Ritchie-Pickow sound recordings can be listened to by appointment with Special Collections in the Hardiman Library, University of Galway.
For a guide to the collection see library.nuigalway.ie/digitalscholarship/projects/ritchie-pickow/
Watch Banríon na nAmhrán here.
If you find something in your attic, on bookshelves or elsewhere that you feel is noteworthy get in touch with the Irish Community Archive Network (iCAN). It will direct you as to what it collects, how to creates digital archives in the community and how the public can get involved. ouririshheritage.org/content/about/ican