Peig irish book archive#
Peig irish book full#
Peig irish book series#

'She had a tremendous capacity for joy and she had very many friends of all ages,' says Almquist. Transcripts of these have never been published, according to Bo Almquist, UCD's professor emeritus of folklore but it is hoped to publish the first volume of these shortly.

Peig irish book archive#

Ríleanna agus Téipeannaon RTÉ Raidió na Gaeltachta will feature archive material over the next two Sundays, including audio from the BBC in which she speaks English.Īnother wellspring from Peig's recorded output is the huge archive of audio in UCD's folklore department. the fact that she was an exceptional storyteller in world terms.' Refuting the notion that Peig was a monoglot, 'Her real importance isn't the book, Peig, but. Peig: Reflections on an Old Woman,goes out on RTÉ Radio 1 tomorrow night, there is a consensus among the academics and specialists who spoke to him that Peig has been harshly judged by facile expressions of classroom boredom, and that people didn't actually look to see what was in the text itself or what Peig did. She was a public performer.'Īccording to broadcaster Cathal Poirtéir, whose radio documentary, She had the gift of being able to talk to everyone. 'She asked her son to get us something - he got us a slice of bread and jam. She'll be valued in a different light when they are all seen.'īorn in the same place as Peig, Feiritéar recalls seeing her lying in bed in the corner of her house with a bandage across her eye when they called on the Wren Day, Lá an Dreoilín. 'They were supposed to be published 10 years ago when I did the film on her. He believes that people will look at her in a new way when all the stories that were taken down from her are published. It was just the way the book was directed with the poor mouth and all the bad things that happened to her, her sons dying and people going away to America.' Peig Sayers 'is much greater than her book', he says. 'The good stories weren't told, but those were hard times anyway. Voice of Generations: The Story of Peig Sayers, will be screened tomorrow night on RTÉ1, is anxious to explain the focus in Peig on tales of woe. 'People managed to laugh, they managed to entertain themselves, they managed to cope with a lot of the stuff that life threw at them through a lot of strategies that were handed down in stories to a huge extent.'įilm-maker Breandán Feiritéar, whose restored 1998 television documentary, And as an adult reader you can get behind the packaging in which she is presented and see more of her personality.'īOURKE SAYS THAT with the tough economic times we are going through there is an interest in how people managed hardship in the past. She's a person of real-life experience and she was a very talented storyteller. When I have talked to American students who don't have any of the cultural baggage that comes with growing up in Ireland, they have found her absolutely fascinating. However, all the recorded stories show that Peig was, she says, 'a very strong, very vivid personality'.īourke thinks 'there's a great disservice done to her memory because she's been on school courses and she's mostly associated with sitting on the hard old bench at school and having to study something.

Peig irish book full#

Peig tells stories full of anger, negativity and profanity, though only those that suited the tastes of what was a repressive time were printed, says Bourke. Had I known in advance half, or even one-third of what the future had in store for me, my heart wouldn't have been as gay or as courageous as it was in the beginning of my days.' The opening doleful lines of her 1936 book, as dictated to her son, Maidhc, read: 'I'm an old woman now with one foot in the grave and the other on its edge. Peig,was enough to induce despair and anguish in the hearts of many Leaving Cert students. The version of Peig depicted in her autobiography,

Peig was the headline act on the Irish curriculum throughout the 1960s and 1970s, until she became the butt of jokes and a figure of ridicule.

'It's a rehabilitation of Peig,' says Malachy Moran, RTÉ Radio's manager of audio services and archives. It presents a fresher, earthier version of Peig, where her sense of fun and warmth come to the fore.

Peig irish book series#

The Blasket Islander is to be re-introduced to the public through a series of lectures and broadcasts throughout the next week.Ī new online archive exhibition has been launched on RTÉ's website using rare recordings of Peig made by Séamus Ennis and Seán Mac Reamoinn in 1947. PEIG SAYERS, the great storyteller who died 50 years ago on Monday, and who was the scourge and torment of Leaving Cert students for decades, is undergoing a makeover. Peig Sayers was long the bane of Irish secondary-school students, but now, on the 50th anniversary of her death, the great Blasket Island storyteller is undergoing something of a reappraisal, writes