Irish Folklore Commission

There's a photograph from 1946 of four men in Killarney, County Kerry.

One of them is Seamus Ó Duilearga, known in English as Dalagie, director of the Irish Folklore Commission.

Another one is Walt Disney.

I need to add a small caveat straight away.

Other accounts put Disney's first trip to Ireland in 1947.

It doesn't change much for the story, but you should know the dates didn't quite agree.

The Irish Folklore Commission was founded in 1935, and by the time it was wound up in 1970, it had become one of the largest collections of oral tradition anywhere in the world.

Recorded from storytellers all over the country, a great deal of it is in Irish, including the leprechaun stories from which Ó Giolláin later drew his 300 manuscripts.

Somebody with a real place of respect in the community.

In the 1930s, the Irish Folklore Commission had schoolchildren all over the country go home and write down the stories that their elders told.

That archive is full of Samhain ghost stories.

And they've changed.

And, you know, that has proven to be the case.

Now, we were really, really fortunate in County Clare that it was one of the counties that got great attention from the Irish Folklore Commission in the 1920s and 30s and 40s and the decades that followed.

So that obviously was in recognition of the depth of folklore and oral tradition that was in the county.

When, I suppose, the potential for community groups and individuals and historians to themselves record memory and folklore, that expanded it into the broader communities.

Can you talk to us a bit about the significance of Clare in terms of the history of folklore and oral recording in this country?

Yes, well, thank you for having me on, Alan, and good morning to Tomás.

Yeah, Clare received a lot of attention from the Irish Folklore Commission.

even before the arrival of the Folklore Commission on the scene and the commission was established in 1935, people like Thomas Johnson Westrop had been documenting folklore.

Dr. John Walsh, as he prefers to be known, John Walsh, a friend to the Isle of Man, he'd been over on several occasions, and he was giving a talk in Irish to the Royal Irish Academy all about Eamon de Valera's visit to the Isle of Man and the importance of it.

that that visit had, not least because de Valera basically said to the Irish Folklore Commission, you need to get over to the Isle of Man and start collecting the last of the native speakers.

And that's exactly what they did.

They came along with their recording devices and made really important and invaluable recordings.

I don't think there were too many teenagers listening to Manx radio, but we could pick it up on medium wave.

and I was fascinated by this language that sounded very similar to the one that I could speak and so really through the good services of Manx Radio I became acquainted with Manx and then I was lucky in the early years in Galway to get the opportunity to go to the Isle of Man and start looking into the revival with the support of people like Adrian Cain and I met yourself at the time and I was in the Bonscoil and met various people involved in the revival and was very impressed by the work that was being done.

And during one of those visits in 2007, I went to the Manx Museum, Manx National Heritage, and started looking into the trip of Éamon de Valera, the former Irish Taoiseach, or Prime Minister, in 1947 to the isle of man which was a private visit which led to the recordings of the irish folklore commission um of the last native speakers of manx and i was really fascinated by this story i'd come across a few references to it i mean george broderick has written about it and there's an interesting book about the history of the folklore commission that mentions it in passing but nobody really had looked at it in any depth So I spent a very happy week in the museum in Douglas in 2007, looking at the correspondence between the museum and the Folklore Commission in Dublin, looking at the newspaper reports from the time.

And you may find this hard to believe, but it actually took me until last year to write up that information.

Wrote several poetry collections, including ones on Irish myths and legends.

She was only 35 when she died and she had recently married Seamus McManus, who I believe was the original curator of the Irish Folklore Commission.

I think that might be the guy who showed Walt Disney around when they were researching for Darby O'Gill and the Little People.

I could be wrong, but that name really rings a bell.